By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service
KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Kyle Larson won’t say it. No athlete in his position would.
But with his never-say-quit victory in Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway, the driver of the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet took a giant step toward a third NASCAR Cup Series championship.
Is the title now Larson’s to lose? The demurral came quickly.
“No, no,” Larson said during his post-race press conference, laughing off the suggestion. “There are still six races, and I only have a 26, I think, point lead on Denny (Hamlin). That could be swallowed up in a hurry. I scored 76 points today.
“So, Denny could go have a max points day next week, and I could blow an engine, like Noah (Gragson) did in the first stage, and I’m down 70-some points right there.
“No, I don’t look at it like that. I’m just really trying to do the best job I can, again. And, yeah, just show up to the racetrack and kind of block out all that stuff.”
It’s only natural for Larson to downplay his prospects, but here’s the reality. In the first four races of the Chase presented by Mobil 1, the defending series champ has gained 84 points on Hamlin, who entered the postseason as the top seed.
Larson is the only Chase driver who has performed at an elite level in all four Chase races. He was fifth at Darlington Raceway, first at World Wide Technology Raceway, second at Bristol Motor Speedway and first again at Kansas.
Yes, he leads Hamlin by only 26 points, an advantage that could disappear in a single race. But Larson also leads third-place Christopher Bell by 50 points and fourth-place Joey Logano by 67—and both Bell and Logano also are Chase race winners.
The remaining 12 Chase drivers range from 91 points behind (Ryan Blaney in fifth) to 187 points out of the running (Daniel Suarez in 16th).
“Yeah, I think in that side of things, yeah, you start paying less attention maybe to the other guys that you feel like are probably close to out of contention,” Larson acknowledged. “But yeah, you’re still trying to run the best laps that you can and execute great restarts, good pit stops, all the things.
“Then, yeah, wherever the points kind of shake out at the end of the day, they shake out.”
The surge to the top of the standings isn’t all about Larson. His No. 5 team has done everything necessary to make him a winner.
On Sunday, for example, crew chief Cliff Daniels made a last-second call to bring Larson to pit road after the team, monitoring Chase Briscoe’s radio, heard that Briscoe was pitting from second place behind Larson.
That move kept the No. 5 car in the lead after pit stops cycled out, where pitting a lap later probably would have cost Larson the top spot.
“In this case we knew all week that if we’re the leader coming to the final green flag pit stop in Stage 3 that we were going to have to cover that, depending on what the gap out back was,” Daniels said. “Of course, the gap out back was super close.
“Credit to the guys in our war room and our engineer here. They do what we all do to play the game, and you scan the other guy. We heard them call it out over the radio late trying to probably keep us from hearing it and making it to pit road in time.
“I called it out to (spotter) Tyler (Monn). Of course, he called it out over the radio, and Kyle made it clean. That was important to try to defend the lead at that point.”
Larson’s pit crew was flawless as well. On every stop under caution, the No. 5 Chevrolet was first off pit road.
“Our pit crew was phenomenal all day,” Daniels said. “I believe their fastest stop may have been an 8.5 (seconds), and their slowest stop was an 8.7. Super tight in that window of consistency and speed.
“Those guys, even when we haven’t been great performance-wise on track at times this year and during the summer, they’ve been really strong on pit road all year… For those guys to have a great day today, we would not have stayed in the race the way that we did without them.”
Bottom line? Larson’s team is beginning to look something like the juggernaut that carried former Hendrick driver Jimmie Johnson to five straight championships—and a record-tying seven overall.
Consider also that Larson has two wins and three second-place finishes in nine Gen 7 era starts at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, which hosts the next race on the Chase calendar.
Still, Larson prefers to poor-mouth his success. After all, he started on the front row at Kansas according to metrics after qualifying was rained out.
“I’m not convinced that I was better than them (the Toyotas) because we didn’t get to qualify, so I got to line up on the front row,” Larson said. “Logano was up there. His team has kind of struggled here over the NextGen era, I would say. He was kind of clogging the field up there that first run.
“So, yeah, I don’t want to read into it… If a Toyota was out in the lead, they could have potentially looked better than us. It’s just there was no qualifying. The weekend could have looked quite a bit different if, say, I qualify seventh. I don’t know if it would have looked as good as it did today.”
There’s another unknown in the equation. It would be highly unusual for Larson not to face serious adversity at some point during a 10-race Chase. That’s the nature of the beast.
However, all indications from the first four postseason races suggest that Larson and his team will be able to handle any pitfalls that may come their way.
