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<\/p>\nTwo tires or four? Four tires or two? One question, one moment, one irrevocable choice, a championship on the line. For Kyle Larson and crew chief Cliff Daniels, the question of how to proceed in the final seconds of the final race of the 2025 NASCAR Cup season would determine whether they would hoist a trophy, or spend the season\u2019s final minutes mired in the pack, and the next few months mired in regret.<\/p>\n
Daniels\u2019 first instinct on the final pit stops was to take four tires, which would mean gaining speed on the field, but at the cost of track position. His engineers advised him to consider thinking bigger and bolder, to make, in Daniels\u2019 words on Sunday night, \u201cthe call that we have to make to get ourselves up front and to give ourselves a shot.\u201d<\/p>\n
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So when a late-race caution with three laps remaining ripped near-certain victory \u2014 and a championship \u2014 right out of Denny Hamlin\u2019s hands, Daniels and Larson communicated over the radio via the use of code words \u2014 no sense tipping off the competition over an open mic \u2014 and with that, set in motion the events that would win Larson his second championship and deal Hamlin, who’s infamously NASCAR’s winningest driver without a championship, the most heartbreaking loss of his career.<\/p>\n
Larson assured Daniels he would wheel the hell out of a car on two changed tires. That was good enough for Daniels, who ordered the two-tire stop that would put Larson ahead of Hamlin. And from there, Larson sat in the car, anxious but happy \u2014 \u201chappy that I got the caution, and then happy that we took two tires and were able to come out ahead of Denny,\u201d he told Yahoo Sports on Monday. Hamlin had opted for four tires, which would have been more useful had he not been buried on the fifth row of the restart with only two laps remaining.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was able to get through (turns) 1 and 2 good and keep my momentum,\u201d Larson said. \u201cI was surprised that (Hamlin) wasn\u2019t able to get a better first corner than he did, but he just got stuck three-wide on the bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Kyle Larson celebrates in victory lane after winning the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series championship. (Photo by Jared C. Tilton\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
(Jared C. Tilton via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Larson\u2019s spotter Tyler Monn kept one eye on Larson and another on Hamlin, letting Larson know that Hamlin was struggling in the pack behind him. \u201cThat gave me a little bit more ease as I got under the white flag (signaling one lap to go),\u201d Larson said. \u201cI just knew I needed to put together a couple more good corners and we would be the champion.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Monn\u2019s voice grew more excited as the turns wound down, but Larson tried to stay focused on what was ahead. He imagined what the final turns would look like, what the cars around and ahead of him were going to do in the closing laps, preparing himself for every eventuality. It\u2019s a level of awareness born of years of experience winning big races \u2014 and also losing them, too.<\/p>\n
Since this race\u2019s loser is getting as much, if not more, ink as the winner, it\u2019s worth noting that Larson, now a two-time champion, has tremendous empathy for Hamlin\u2019s ongoing, vain, painful struggle to win a Cup Series title.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat Denny is going through, for me, would be the Chili Bowl,\u201d Larson said. \u201cIt took me 13 years to finally win, and I had been so close. Blew up leading. Christopher Bell passed me on the last lap. Thirteen years at that time was half of my lifetime trying to win this race.\u201d<\/p>\n
And all the time, Larson was wrestling with an ever-growing sense of futility and frustration. \u201cI would always have these demons,\u201d he said. \u201cYou know, those stupid voices in your head saying, \u2018You\u2019re gonna screw up,\u2019 or \u2018A caution is going to come out and you\u2019re going to lose.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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If there\u2019s any solace that Hamlin can take in what\u2019s surely the darkest race of his career, it\u2019s this: Once Larson nabbed his first Chili Bowl, in 2020, he won a whole lot more \u2014 two more Chili Bowls, 26 NASCAR Cup Series races, plus those two NASCAR titles.<\/p>\n
\u201cI won a lot of races before the Chili Bowl,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the first Chili Bowl I got, all these big wins started flooding in after. And I think it was just because mentally, I got over the hurdle of doubt that I had in my own mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe there\u2019s a path out of the darkness for Hamlin there, maybe not. If nothing else, Larson acknowledges that NASCAR\u2019s current one-race, winner-take-all format paid off huge for him while wishing for something a little more comprehensive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat this format presents is definitely some excitement and craziness, but a better format would at least have a larger sample size to crown a champion,\u201d Larson said. \u201cObviously, we got extremely lucky yesterday, and Denny got extremely unlucky. Whether it\u2019s 36 races or 10 or four or whatever the number may be, I think anything larger than one race would be a little bit more fair.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Fair or not, Larson\u2019s name will go into the NASCAR record books as the 2025 champion. (He finished as the season-long points leader and had three wins, so it\u2019s not like he vultured a championship.) NASCAR is likely to change the title format next year, but Larson has put himself in a position to challenge for any title, no matter what the format. He has both the experience and the confidence to make the kinds of split-second decisions that are the difference between a title and heartbreak.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s just,\u201d he said, \u201ca shocking way to win the championship.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two tires or four? Four tires or two? One question, one moment, one irrevocable choice, a championship on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,556,120534,3932,4386,634,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-259994","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-championship","11":"tag-cliff-daniels","12":"tag-denny-hamlin","13":"tag-kyle-larson","14":"tag-nascar","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}