Jeff Gordon sat up after four-word message on Kyle – Sports News
Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon shed mild on the pivotal message that Kyle Larson acquired over the crew radio moments earlier than he claimed the NASCAR Cup Series title.
On Sunday, Larson miraculously coasted down victory lane at Phoenix Raceway regardless of having not led a single lap previous to extra time. The No. 5 Chevrolet driver overcame no scarcity of obstacles en path to securing his second championship, together with a blown tire and a one-lap deficit.
Yet when issues regarded their lowest, Gordon revealed that Larson’s crew chief, Cliff Daniels, by no means misplaced hope. “I heard Cliff going, ‘We’re OK here, guys.’ I don’t know exactly what he meant by that because we were running out of laps,” Gordon mentioned. “You can just never say it’s over. Never quit and never count out Cliff Daniels and Kyle Larson and this number five team.
“This sums up their complete season, actually. This complete race was like their complete season and you’ve got simply acquired to like that struggle.”
In Larson’s eyes, Daniels’ upbeat attitude and unwavering leadership ultimately set him apart from the other Championship 4 drivers vying for the Bill France Cup. “He works so onerous. He places in a lot effort, not solely on this crew however on himself personally,” Larson said of Daniels. “We all need it so dangerous for ourselves however even more for him and his management and how onerous he works at it.
“I knew all four of [the Championship 4 drivers’] cars would be pretty equal this week. I knew our teams were pretty comparable. But I knew I had Cliff Daniels and that’s something nobody else had.”
As Daniels famous, nonetheless, he’s removed from the one member of the No. 5 storage who performed a pivotal position in Sunday’s victory. Once a late-race warning with three laps remaining turned the chances in Larson’s favor, the 37-year-old was initially leaning in the direction of taking 4 tires on the ultimate pit stops — a resolution that will in flip value invaluable observe place.
Daniels’ engineers urged that Larson as a substitute run on two modified tires, which ended up being the race-defining transfer. “I have to acknowledge that it was a pretty ugly day for us,” he conceded. “At times we were up front, kind of in the top three, a little bit in the mix. Certainly (Denny Hamlin) was better than us. I think we were beat on raw pace today. After we had the flat tire, there wasn’t a lot of good things coming our way at the time.
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“We knew we would have more shots for pit stops and for restarts maybe mix it up a bit. The way that the team stuck together and continued to believe in each other, Kyle continued to believe that if we just had a shot, we could close it out. That was what was put on display today.”
In what’s been an incredibly challenging season both on and off the racetrack, Daniels stressed the importance of “banding together” inside Hendrick Motorsports. “We’ve had things going on away from the racetrack where we’ve had to overcome obstacles, sometimes even tragedy, and work through a lot of things together,” he mentioned. “To me, there’s a lot of magnificence in that, of a crew banding collectively the best way we’ve this season. That was actually showcased at this time.”
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