'Mixed emotions': McReynolds reflects on safety, wins, Earnhardt's death ahead of Daytona 500

During his upcoming 23rd year as part of the Fox NASCAR broadcast team, Larry McReynolds will expertly give the weekly run down on the mechanics and changes/improvements of the Next-Gen car.

As a long-time crew chief, stressing the specifics of things like rocker boxes and headers, tire walls and crush panels, comes naturally to him.

But when given a chance — which on race day, isn’t often — he’s quite capable of impactful, intrapersonal articulation as well. Just ask him about returning to Daytona each year.

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“It’s very mixed emotions because (as a crew chief) I was fortunate enough to win the 500 twice — in 1992 with Davey Allison in the 28 car and then six years later with Dale Earnhardt,” McReynolds said via phone call last week. “Those two guys loved racing at Daytona and Talladega, they were very, very good at it.

"And to know that neither one of them is with us anymore and I was a part of their only Daytona 500 win, that only ramps up how tremendously special it really is.”

Earnhardt’s death in 2001 particularly resonated with McReynolds. In 1998, he sat on the pit box as Earnhardt exorcised 20 years of Daytona 500 demons and finally won the Great American Race. Pit members from every other crew lined pit road to high-five the Intimidator as he made his way to Victory Lane.

There have been few, if any moments in the history of motorsports that could rival the unified reverence and sport-wide approval of that one. Three years later, McReynolds, like the rest of the world, could only watch as triumph turned to tragedy.

“To know the guy I won it with in 1998, just three years later, in our very first weekend of NASCAR on Fox, that he was killed … I’d be the first to say I think Dale felt he was invincible,” McReynolds said. “But I think we found out that none of us are invincible, not even Dale Earnhardt, unfortunately.”

And yet, it’s that moment that has McReynolds steadfast in the belief that the safety problems arising with last year’s Next-Gen car will be sorted out. Concussions and other injuries due to rear impacts led to an early retirement for Kurt Busch and caused Alex Bowman to miss five playoff races in 2022. Spontaneous in-car fires also threatened drivers and ended races prematurely for an unlucky few.

While unfortunate, McReynolds believes NASCAR is on the right path toward rectifying the situation and has faith the organization won’t quit working until the solutions are found. That conviction stems from the pain McReynolds said he still feels today. While Earnhardt’s death cast a cloud over the sport that may never completely clear, the silver lining can be seen in every SAFER Barrier, HANS device and, yes, in efforts to improve crushing in the rear ends of the Next-Gen.

“We all know the watershed moment for safety was the final corner of the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 when we lost Dale Earnhardt,” McReynolds said. “When you look at 1999 and 2000, we had some knocks on the door that we were way behind on safety — safety of the cars, safety of the tracks, safety of everything. We lost Tony Roper in a truck wreck at Texas, we lost Adam Petty at Loudon, we lost Kenny Irwin at Loudon — we kept getting those little knocks on the door but February of 2001, at the end of the Daytona 500, the door got kicked plum off the hinges.

“The Elvis Presley of NASCAR was killed and all the sudden everybody — NASCAR, the manufacturers, the tracks, the teams, you name it — it was a full-court press with safety. I’m not going to be bold enough to say we wouldn’t be where we’re at today had it not been for Dale Earnhardt getting killed, but I’m not sure we would be.”

The nuts and bolts of the Next Gen's safety, fire concerns

Luckily for all the gearheads out there, McReynolds is more than happy to dive into the particulars of those improvement efforts as well.

“The rear is a little more complicated than the front because you’ve got 20 gallons of gas back there, you have oil back there and its not really a big area and you couldn’t sacrifice the integrity of the fuel cell or oil tank just to make the car where it had more crush,” he explained. “What they’ve done to the rear of the center section, the rear section itself and even the bumper structure, there’s no doubt it’s a lot less stiff and has more crush, which I think is going to be good on rear impacts.

"But can they close the file and close the drawer and say, ‘We’ve got it. Let’s move onto something else?’ No. Unfortunately, we’ll have to have some crashes to see what we’ve gained and where we’ve come from.”

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The fires that drew the ire of Kevin Harvick at Darlington in the fall seemed to be present already this season as Ty Gibbs’ car erupted in flames in a practice prior to the Busch Light Clash, forcing the rookie to pull to the apron and bail out. However, NASCAR has since determined the fire was caused by an improper muffler instillation and was unrelated to last season’s issues.

“Basically, in the rocker boxes, at certain tracks like Darlington and Dover and places we have tire degradation and rubber comes off the tire, there was rubber collecting on top of the headers in the rocker boxes and the heat was causing the fires,” McReynolds said. “Everybody was experiencing it, but I will say this: A trend and pattern I did see, it seemed to be more in the Ford camp.

"I think it was conducive with the way the headers were designed. It wasn’t 1,000 percent all on NASCAR’s shoulders. Do we have it rectified? We’ll have to run a few more races to make sure but I know they’ve worked diligently on it throughout the offseason.”

'A tough act to follow': Parity in 2022 will be tough to top in 2023

While the Next Gen had its drawbacks, as McReynolds points out, there were plenty of positives as well. In particular, the fact 19 different drivers went to Victory Lane in 2022 pointed to a competitive product on race days.

“No doubt, we have a tough act to follow,” he said. “With this car and the way the rules are, it’s hard for that gap to open up but you still get a feeling that the strong is going to prevail and the cream is going to rise to the top. I just don’t know that we’ll ever see the gap that we saw with the old car.”

And in McReynolds’ mind, that’s a good thing. It also has him a bit puzzled to hear fans clamor for the “good old days.” McReynolds was a part of those years that many NASCAR fans point to as the gold standard but as he remembers them, they weren’t so good, at least not in terms of racing.

“I hear fans today go, ‘We want racing to be the way it used to be.' You know what? We may think we do, but we really, really don’t,” McReynolds said. “Throughout the season MRN and Sirius will play old races and if I’m riding around, I’ll listen to them because a lot of them, I was a part of it. I remember listening to a race from Atlanta, I think it might have been from the mid-80s. There were two cars on the lead lap. The 10th-place car was a five laps down. I don’t think that’s really what we want.

“We used to go road course racing whether it was Riverside or Watkins Glen or Sonoma — you could count on one hand what driver and what team was probably going to win and maybe have a finger or two left over. Now, teams and drivers put as much effort into road-course racing as they do anywhere else and it’s about as hard to pick a winner for our road courses as it is for Daytona, Las Vegas, Phoenix or anywhere else."

A win celebrated by all

When McReynolds arrives in Daytona this week and before he dons his mechanic’s hat, there will be a moment of remembrance when he, like most others attending this week, looks down the tri-oval to Turn 4 and acknowledges the past.

Yet, with talk revolving around NASCAR’s 75^th anniversary, it’s not Earnhardt’s death that will play in his mind, but the safety advances that followed, saving an unknown number of lives in the generations that have followed and will follow.

All of that, and one historic victory, anyway.

“We’ve been doing a lot of pieces about the 75^th anniversary, and I kind of stay away from it because to me, it’s kind of self-serving and that’s something I work hard not to do,” McReynolds said. “But most shows I’ve done, when they ask about special moments in the 75-year history, I always kind of bring up the ’79 Daytona 500 with Bobby (Allison), Donnie (Allison) and Cale (Yarborough) but it never fails, somebody brings up that ’98 500 because it was a pretty special moment for our sport. I was lucky to be part of it.”

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: DAYTONA 500: McReynolds talks Earnhardt, Next Gen car, safety concerns