Kyle Larson is very much a man on a mission. That mission is to add yet another NASCAR title to the one he captured so emphatically in 2021.
And he aims to do it breaking more records as he goes. Although the Californian native didn’t add another victory to his tally on Sunday, he passed Kurt Busch for 20th on the all-time list of laps led en route to a second place finish behind Denny Hamlin.
The effort was worthy of victory with Larson leading a race-high 129 laps in the opening round of the NASCAR Cup Series Round of 8, netting a further 19 stage points to move 35 points above the cutline with two events left before the Championship 4 is set.
“Hats off to my team, too,” Larson is quoted on the official Hendrick Motorsports website. “We had an awesome day as well. Good points day, obviously.”
THE TALE OF THE RACE – Hendrick Motorsports Official
Chase Elliott, William Byron and Larson qualified fourth, fifth and sixth respectively and had front-of-field speed from the drop of the green flag on Sunday. Byron was the first to reach the front of the field, cycling through on the first set of pit stops in stage one. A caution with nine laps to go brought the field down pit road a final time but Byron was able to hold them all off to score the stage win with Larson right behind in second and Elliott in fifth.
Stage two was more of the same for the organization, this time with Larson ascending to the top of the scoring pylon. The driver of the No. 5 Chevy showed the way for the bulk of the second segment and came home with a stage win with Byron in third.
Late in stage three, Larson and Byron seemed poised to post a 1-2 sweep for Hendrick Motorsports. Larson slipped by Byron with 36 laps to go. Just five laps later, Byron was swept up in a big crash, taking him out of contention.
Big trouble for the No. 24 of @WilliamByron! pic.twitter.com/I2fncPZeWW
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) October 13, 2025
While the team’s three playoff drivers shuffled positions toward the front, Alex Bowman methodically closed in. By the time a restart with 31 circuits to go went green, Bowman was in the top six and powered to third with a push from behind.
However, his run was stalled by another yellow flag as a massive crash erupted before the leaders could even exit turn two. Several laps of cleanup were required but when the green flag finally waved again, Bowman (third) and Larson (fourth) filled the second row.
Though the Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolets had unmatchable long-run pace throughout the day, the short run was too much to navigate. Larson battled eventual-winner Denny Hamlin tooth and nail for second before succumbing. He’d pick off Chase Briscoe with a couple of laps to go to secure the runner-up spot.
“(Hamlin) must’ve nailed the bottom behind me, got to my inside and it was kind of over from there,” Larson said. “Hats off to them.”
Bowman, meanwhile, came home seventh. Elliott settled for an 18th-place showing.
Hendrick Motorsports Switches to Acronis Cyber Protect to Support All Devices and Application Data.
The Championship-winning NASCAR team also implements Acronis Machine Learning to address a unique photo classification problem it faced during races.
Hendrick Motorsports is a NASCAR racing operation that fields four Chevrolet teams in the NASCAR Cup Series. Since its inception in 1984, the team has won a record-setting 13 championships in the top-level Cup Series. Located in Concord, North Carolina, Hendrick Motorsports sits on a 100-acre campus, which includes 14 buildings and has a team of more than 600 employees.
In terms of its cyber protection needs, Hendrick Motorsports had a diverse set of needs ranging from daily backups of all devices, all engineering and wind tunnel data, and supporting the unique needs of its mobile data center during races. Before Acronis, the company was using a competitor product to back up its servers and virtual machines.
THE CHALLENGE: PROTECTING OTHER WORKLOADS
Hendrick Motorsports needed to protect workloads that its previous provider could not support, and this came in two distinct forms. First, the company was not backing up its endpoint devices or the Microsoft 365 data it used for communication and collaboration including mailboxes, Teams channels, and Sharepoint sites.
Furthermore, Hendrick Motorsports’ previous backup and recovery provider did not support backups to multiple locations. The company rightfully wanted to keep backups in more than one location and take advantage of cloud targets for backup as well implement a disaster recovery solution.
The second distinct form of workload protection Hendrick Motorsports couldn’t support with its previous provider came from the IT infrastructure at a race event itself. In addition to setting up a mobile data center at each race with over 50 virtual machines that remotely connects back to headquarters, the team was receiving a significant amount of photo data during races. Hendrick
Motorsports would send and receive up to 5,000 pictures during a 3-hour race, or a high-resolution picture every two seconds. The company needed a way to store, organize, and search these photos for analysis.