The NASCAR Cup Series is 77 years old and Larry McReynolds has been inside the garage for 50 of them with no signs of slowing down whatsoever.
Well, kind of.
On Sunday, the two-time Daytona 500 winning crew chief and longtime NASCAR on FOX analyst will lead the field to green in the Quaker State 400 at Echopark Speedway. In other words, he’s going to have slow down for the field before they go really fast.
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But that’s the only thing slow about the 67-year-old these days. In advance of his honorary duties on Sunday, Motorsport.com spent time with the co-host of SiriusXM NASCAR Radio’s On-Track to discuss numerous topics related to America’s Crew Chief.
The following conversation has been lightly cleaned up for clarity.
Motorsport: We know you had some health challenges earlier this year. Are you in a good place?
Larry Mac: I’m good, and I’ve talked about it openly on our radio show, but the cliff notes version is that basically on the morning of the (Circuit of the Americas) race, back in March, I woke up in my hotel room and knew something was not right. I wasn’t sure what. I went to the racetrack and did the broadcast but was just tired. I got back to hotel, got dinner at the lobby bar and called it an early night. The bottom line is that I woke up on Monday morning and found out that I had Bell’s palsy so I called my doctor … and he told me to come straight to his office. They had me on a steroid by Noon and it was all but gone by one week and was back to normal by week two. Thank you for asking because it was certainly a wake-up call, and when I talked about it on the radio show, my message to people was don’t mess around if you get symptoms because the quicker they can treat it, the faster you can get rid of it.
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MS: The folks at Atlanta Motor Speedway wanted to celebrate you this weekend but you also have a relationship with Quaker State, right?
LM: It goes back to about 40 years ago when Kenny Bernstein brought King Racing to NASCAR with Quaker State and I was the crew chief for that car for five years from 1986 to parts of 1981 before I left for Robert Yates Racing. My first three wins were with the Quaker State brand. I had a relationship with a company called Sport Dimensions that handled their media and they got me to come out to the Quaker State 400 when it was at Kentucky to serve as brand ambassador. And what I enjoyed about that is that it allowed me to mix and mingle with fans during the race weekend in ways I can’t do as a broadcaster. … When Brandon Hutchison, the president of Echopark Speedway, called and asked me to drive the pace car, I couldn’t say yes fast enough.
MS: What does that entail? Like are you on cruise control?
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LM: When I waved the green flag, there was one thing they told me I could not do, and that was not to drop the green flag. That wouldn’t be good. I’ll better be able to answer your question on Sunday because we’re going to have a training walkthrough before the race. The pace car speed is 55 miles per hour but I will have to bring them down to 45 miles per hour on pit road so I’ll have a better idea of what all this entails when they give me some training earlier in the day.
MS: Given everything you’ve done in this sport, it would be really easy for you to slow down and do something else, but you’re as wide-open as ever these days. How come?
LM: Well, I love the sport and it’s been amazing to me and my family for 46 years and I want to do anything I can to give back to it. But at the end of the day, I just love what I do. I hit the floor running at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning and start preparing for the radio show. I get asked a lot about retirement, by my wife too, and my answer is that I’ll retire on the day that I wake up in the morning and I don’t feel excited for what I do, the places I get to go to, and the people I get to talk to. … That day isn’t even on my radar right now but if that changes, I will let you know.
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MS: How important is the SiriusXM Radio show to keeping you plugged in and current within a sport that moves so fast?
LM: Our sport is so different from stick and ball sports. You can walk away from baseball, football or hockey, probably for a year, and when you come back, there might be some players on different teams but it hasn’t changed a whole lot. If you turn your back on NASCAR a month, you could turn back around and there’s eight tires and wheels all of a sudden, and that’s just what we do. This sport basically evolves from week-to-week and I couldn’t imagine walking away from the sport once our NASCAR on FOX season ends in May and not paying attention until February. It would be so hard to keep up with everything and SiriusXM has given me that opportunity for over 10 years and I am very flattered and honored that they do. It keeps me connected. There isn’t a single conversation or interview we do where I still don’t learn something about the sport. It’s important to me to keep learning because when I stop, that’s the day that the people at FOX are going to look for someone more current, but I do feel like I am current. I also appreciate that Richard Childress Racing and my son-in-law Jordan Anderson have let me pinch hit and call races as a crew chief for them several times over the past couple of years in the O’Reilly Series. I just think that it’s really important to stay plugged into what everyone is doing out there every weekend.
Tyler Reddick, 23XI Racing, Denny Hamlin, Michael Jordan
Tyler Reddick, 23XI Racing, Denny Hamlin, Michael Jordan
MS: You and Denny Hamlin didn’t see eye-to-eye on the 23XI lawsuit against NASCAR and you were very vocal in your opposition to it. Did the end result change your mind at all? Are you and Denny in a better place now?
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LM: Yeah, we are, but I still wouldn’t expect you to walk into a restaurant and see us having dinner together. We don’t have that kind of relationship and I’m not sure we did before this anyway. I still say the lawsuit was not a good look. I feel like it was taking away from what we should have been talking about. The trial last December prevented us from talking about Connor Zilisch’s rookie season or the new Chevrolet body, everything related to the 2026 season. We spent every day talking about the trial. But with that said, and I don’t want to come across as back pedaling or like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth, but I do feel like the sport came out of it strong as a result. I feel like we are in a better place. I did question it the whole time, feeling like it wasn’t a good look for the sport, but now that it’s over and settled with, I am so thankful that they settled and didn’t take it to the jury. My fear was that 12 jurors knew so little about NASCAR and they were going to be responsible for shaping the entire future of our sport. That was a little bit scary to me. But the good news is that they settled it out of court and I really do feel like the sport is in a stronger place.
MS: What do you think NASCAR looks like 10 years from now and further out?
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LM: I really like that question because it’s what I like most about our sport. It’s going to change but I don’t think anyone really knows where it’s going. If you had told me 15 years ago that there will be a car that debuts in 2022, it’s going to be a store bought chassis, and all the pieces come standard and that’s what you have to race. I would say that you’re out of your mind. Well, here we are, 32 or 33 single-source-supplied parts that you pull out of the plastic wrapper and you can’t change it, and that includes the entire chassis. And that’s something I don’t necessarily like because I’m a crew chief. I like to tinker and I really respected the engineers who could build a better race car. But I understand why we did it, because when I was a crew chief, I was made aware of how expensive my tinkering could get. Every time I wanted to innovate or create something, I had to take it to the (owner) and convince them why we were doing it.
But what that taught me is that these cars are going to evolve again by 2036. The engineers will evolve and I don’t know for sure that I will be around as much as I am now to see it. It might be time to hang out on the boat by then. I think our engines will be different by then and I do think change is a beautiful thing.
My favorite thing about NASCAR right now is the schedule changes every year. Fans used to ask me about the schedule 15 years ago and I would tell them take a copy of that year’s schedule and run it through the copier and that is more than likely what you were going to get the next year. I think our sport was getting a little stagnant. This isn’t me drinking the Kool Aid because I’m a race fan and I really love a lot of things we’re doing right now. I have never received a check from NASCAR and this is my opinion.
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But to be brutally honest, I was scared for the sport 10, 12 and 15 years ago. I did not think we had good leadership and we were taking a lot of wrong roads. I know Steve Phelps isn’t here anymore, but him and Steve O’Donnell, Ben Kennedy and Elton Sawyer, with the series directors, we are in a good spot. We aren’t reinventing the wheel but we have smart guys in control that are doing some really special things.
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