Kyle Larson won\u2019t say it. No athlete in his position would.<\/p>\n
But with his never-say-quit victory in Sunday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Is the title now Larson\u2019s to lose? The demurral came quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, no,\u201d Larson said during his post-race press conference, laughing off the suggestion. \u201cThere 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, 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\u2019m down 70-some points right there.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I don\u2019t look at it like that. I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s only natural for Larson to downplay his prospects, but here\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014and both Bell and Logano also are Chase race winners.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, 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,\u201d Larson acknowledged. \u201cBut yeah, you\u2019re still trying to run the best laps that you can and execute great restarts, good pit stops, all the things.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen, yeah, wherever the points kind of shake out at the end of the day, they shake out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The surge to the top of the standings isn\u2019t all about Larson. His No. 5 team has done everything necessary to make him a winner.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s radio, heard that Briscoe was pitting from second place behind Larson.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn this case we knew all week that if we\u2019re 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,\u201d Daniels said. \u201cOf course, the gap out back was super close.<\/p>\n
\u201cCredit 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Larson\u2019s pit crew was flawless as well. On every stop under caution, the No. 5 Chevrolet was first off pit road.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur pit crew was phenomenal all day,\u201d Daniels said. \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose guys, even when we haven\u2019t been great performance-wise on track at times this year and during the summer, they\u2019ve been really strong on pit road all year\u2026 For those guys to have a great day today, we would not have stayed in the race the way that we did without them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bottom line? Larson\u2019s team is beginning to look something like the juggernaut that carried former Hendrick driver Jimmie Johnson to five straight championships\u2014and a record-tying seven overall.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not convinced that I was better than them (the Toyotas) because we didn\u2019t get to qualify, so I got to line up on the front row,\u201d Larson said. \u201cLogano 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, yeah, I don\u2019t want to read into it\u2026 If a Toyota was out in the lead, they could have potentially looked better than us. It\u2019s just there was no qualifying. The weekend could have looked quite a bit different if, say, I qualify seventh. I don\u2019t know if it would have looked as good as it did today.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s 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\u2019s the nature of the beast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyle Larson won\u2019t say it. No athlete in his position would. But with his never-say-quit victory in Sunday\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":913668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-913667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913667","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=913667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/913668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}