Why Kyle Larson’s Crew Chief Promised the Turn Would Come

George Howson|October 23, 2026|
  • Kyle Larson spent much of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season winless, leaning on a crew chief who kept promising the breakthrough was coming.
  • Crew chief Cliff Daniels told SiriusXM listeners in August that Hendrick Motorsports was “capable of running top five, top ten every week” even though results said otherwise at the time.
  • Larson’s new contract, locking him into the No. 5 Chevrolet for years to come, has quietly reshaped the future of teammate Alex Bowman, who is racing for his own job in the final stretch of 2026.

Why Kyle Larson’s Crew Chief Promised the Turn Would Come

Cliff Daniels did not sound like a crew chief with a winless driver sitting in the garage behind him. Back in August, with Kyle Larson stuck without a victory deep into the summer and Hendrick Motorsports searching for answers on a new Chevrolet body that refused to cooperate, Daniels went on SiriusXM NASCAR radio and said the quiet part out loud: the results were bad, but the belief inside the shop had not moved an inch.

“When things don’t work out, you’ve gotta have the mental toughness and resilience to keep coming back, keep showing up, keep fighting through that, and that’s where we are,” Daniels said. “We’re confident that even though the top end of the performance hasn’t been there, we are capable of running top five, top ten every week.”

It was the kind of statement that could have aged badly. A crew chief promising a turnaround for a driver who had not won all season is the sort of quote that gets replayed months later, either as proof of foresight or as evidence nobody in the shop saw what was actually coming. Daniels doubled down anyway, pointing to the people behind the scenes who rarely get credit when a season goes sideways.

“I think from all of the team standpoint, our pickers have been doing great,” Daniels said. “Our shop crew, our road crew have been prepared every week, and now we’ve just gotta, like I said, be ready when it turns. It’s gonna turn, and make sure we’re ready to execute when the time comes. So we’re looking forward to the chase ahead, and I think you’re gonna see us building forward for here.”

A Driver Who Would Not Say It Out Loud, Then Did

Larson himself was more careful with his words, but the message underneath was the same. Speaking with reporters ahead of the Cook Out 400 at Richmond in mid-August, he acknowledged what anyone watching the standings already knew: Hendrick’s four-car operation did not look like a championship threat that summer, Larson included.

“None of us might seem confident as far as winning a championship, but there is still that confidence in there because you’re racing for Hendrick Motorsports, and you know at any point we can turn it around,” Larson said.

That is a careful sentence from a driver who has won a Cup championship before and knows exactly what it costs to say the wrong thing in public during a slump. He was not promising a title. He was promising that the organization had not lost its nerve, which is a different and in some ways harder thing to say when the only Hendrick driver with a win at that point in the year was teammate Chase Elliott. Larson, by multiple counts at the time, was sitting outside the top five in the regular-season standings, still without a trophy, racing a car that engineers across the garage were struggling to balance through the new aerodynamic rules.

The Contract That Changed the Conversation Down Pit Road

While Larson was fighting for speed on Sunday afternoons, Hendrick Motorsports had already made a decision about his future that reverberated well beyond his own car. Months earlier, in February, the team locked Larson into the No. 5 Chevrolet through at least the 2031 season, a six-year commitment that left no ambiguity about who Hendrick considers its driver for the next era.

The deal did something else, too, something nobody at Hendrick needed to say directly for the entire garage to understand it. Alex Bowman, Larson’s teammate in the No. 48 Chevrolet, is racing out the final year of his own extension in 2026, and a six-year lock on one of Hendrick’s four seats sends an unmistakable signal about where the organization’s long-term faith is concentrated. Bowman’s lone victory in that stretch dates back to March 2022, a drought that has quietly become one of the more uncomfortable storylines inside a team that has spent recent years positioning itself as NASCAR’s model organization.

Nobody at Hendrick has called Larson’s deal a verdict on Bowman. They do not need to. A contract that stretches six years into the future, signed while a teammate enters a contract year with one win in four seasons, speaks for itself in a garage where everybody reads between the lines of every press release.

What the Summer Struggles Actually Looked Like

The numbers from midseason tell a story that a championship driver’s fan base would rather forget. By mid-August, Larson sat outside the top tier of the points standings, still chasing his first win of the year, with Hendrick’s only victory belonging to Elliott. The new Chevrolet body had scrambled the usual competitive order across the Cup garage, and teams that once leaned on years of aerodynamic data were starting over with cars that behaved differently at every track type. Analysts watching from outside the organization pointed to the same problem race after race: a front end that would not settle into the balance crews needed, forcing every team on the manufacturer to relearn setups they thought they had already mastered.

For a driver with Larson’s résumé, a season like that carries a specific kind of pressure. He is not a rookie figuring out how NASCAR works. He is a former champion who knows precisely how far a few bad months can drop him in a field that forgives almost nothing once the postseason begins. The silence from Larson in interviews that summer, the careful hedging in his public comments, read less like doubt and more like a driver conserving his energy for the only part of the season that would actually matter.

The Turn Daniels Promised, Arriving Right on Schedule

It did turn. By the time the sport reached its playoff rounds, Larson had rebuilt himself into one of the central figures in the championship conversation, carrying a points lead that at one stage looked all but decisive before the Round of 8 tightened everything back up. Tyler Reddick’s charge ended Toyota’s long wait for a title contender deep in the bracket, and the margin separating Larson from the rest of the field shrank fast enough that nobody inside Hendrick is using the word comfortable anymore. Denny Hamlin, meanwhile, has been pushed into a win-or-go-home weekend at Martinsville just to keep his own hopes alive, a reminder of how quickly the bottom third of this bracket can turn into must-win racing for even the sport’s most accomplished names.

None of that erases what Daniels said back in August, and if anything it sharpens it. A crew chief told anyone listening that the performance would come before anyone else believed him, built on a case rooted entirely in the people doing the unglamorous work on pit road and in the shop rather than in anything happening on the stopwatch. Larson backed him up with a quieter version of the same bet, careful never to promise a trophy but never willing to sound like a driver who had given up on one either.

Whatever happens over these final rounds, the contract sitting in a Hendrick filing cabinet already answered one question that no amount of playoff drama will change. Larson is the driver this organization is building around for the rest of the decade. Bowman, racing every weekend with his own job on the line, is left to answer a very different question with results on the only stage that still matters: this one, right now, with the margin for error gone.

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George Howson

Engineer, Father, Travel addict, Writer, but most of all, a motorsport nut who is never afraid to ask the questions most would back out of and I always tell it like it is.

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