Larry McReynolds on NASCAR's future, Hamlin spat and not slowing down

Motorsport photoThe 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.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.

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 an