Larry McReynolds Reflects on 1998 Daytona 500

Following the 1980 NASCAR Winston Cup Series season, a then 21-year-old Larry McReynolds hooked up a UHaul trailer to the back of his 1971 Ford Pinto and set sail for Greenville, North Carolina.

After a test run with a Cup Series team during a limited 1980 schedule, McReynolds was hired as a full-time employee in 1981. That season kicked off a 20-year run for McReynolds as a crew member, 16 years of which were spent on top of the pit box.

In an interview in October of 2023, McReynolds recounted his career, including his tumultuous 1992 season with Davey Allison and his 1998 Daytona 500 win with Dale Earnhardt.

“My mom and dad looked at me and said, ‘this is the craziest thing we ever heard. You’ll be back in six months. You’ll be broke, you’ll be hungry. We’ll feed you, but we won’t bail you out of debt.’ 43 years later I’m proud to say that I’m still here. I didn’t go broke and I didn’t go hungry.”

One of McReynolds’ most infamous seasons atop the pit box was 1992, in which McReynolds and Allison came up just shy of winning the Winston Cup championship.

“You’d be hard pressed to find a driver and a team that had so many highs and so many lows in one season,” McReynolds said about the No. 28 team’s 1992 campaign. “We won five races, including the Daytona 500. We dominated the All-Star race for the second year in a row. We were leading the points going into the final race of the season at Atlanta and got caught up in a wreck. We went through a period of time, in the spring and early summer, when we were winning one week and wrecking one week. One week, we figured out how to do both in the same night at the All-Star race.”

“Davey lost his grandfather in spring of that year. Davey busted up some ribs in a wreck at Bristol. We won the next week at North Wilkesboro, but Davey barely practiced the car. The wreck at Pocono was the turning point of our season. A lot of people say we lost the championship at Atlanta when we got caught up in the wreck, but in my book, we lost it at Pocono in July. After that, Davey had to have surgery. We spent the next six to eight weeks trying to get him comfortable in the car.”

While McReynolds wasn’t able to procure a championship with Allison, many fans expected his pairing with Earnhardt in 1997 to result in Earnhardt’s record-breaking eighth title. But 1997 ended up being a year where the aging Earnhardt finally showed his age. A winless 1997 campaign left McReynolds searching for answers going into Earnhardt’s 20th Daytona 500 start in February of 1998.

As history will forever remember, McReynolds and Earnhardt earned the greatest victory of their respective careers in the 1998 Daytona 500

“I knew how bad he wanted to win that race,” McReynolds said of Earnhardt. “The man had won 30-something races at Daytona. He’d won everything from IROC, Xfinity Series, Duels, the Clash, the July race, he just hadn’t sealed the deal with the 500.”

“I remember being in victory lane. It was such a surreal moment. I remember taking a step back and taking it all in.”

After his career as a crew chief came to a close in 2000, McReynolds went to work for FOX Sports, and has been a part of the network’s NASCAR coverage for the past 24 seasons.

 

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