TALLADEGA, Ala. — How? How exactly does Kyle Larson, a driver with a notable 0-for-23 career mark at Talladega and fresh from last week’s flub at Phoenix, turn in a masterful stroke of superspeedway wizardry, sinking like a stone with half a lap to go in overtime only to power back with an Earnhardt-esque charge that electrified the track’s rabid crowd?
It was an afternoon when nearly everything went according to plan, when the fates of so many other would-be championship contenders went sideways, wrong-ways or upside-down. And it seemed like that plan was about to unravel almost as spectacularly with a little more than a mile left. Somehow, some way, Larson summoned the ability to press ahead, emerging from the 11th-place ashes in the final two turns to flash across the finish line in first, just 0.041 seconds clear of teammate William Byron.
RELATED: Race results | At-track photos: Talladega
Larson had just blown the NASCAR Cup Series Chase wide open. In the immediate aftermath, he chalked it up to good fortune.
“I [expletive] choked it away so bad, though,” Larson said on the cool-down lap. “I got lucky.”
“It’s all right. All right,” said No. 5 spotter Tyler Monn. “Better to be lucky than good.”
Larson was more good than he let on in Sunday’s YellaWood 500, capitalizing and maximizing while the rest of the Cup Series championship hopefuls endured a day of stepping on rakes. Larson’s title defense now has a staggering 73-point advantage with two races left in the season, both at favorable tracks coming up at Martinsville Speedway and Homestead-Miami Speedway.
A Phoenix collapse by Larson & Co. had tightened The Chase presented by Mobil 1, shrinking his lead to just five points and making the postseason pursuit a seven-horse race. Now The Chase has Larson as a front-running outlier versus the more-distant field, with a chance to close it out at Martinsville in Sunday’s Xfinity 500 (2 p.m. ET, NBC, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“Only took us six years together,” Monn said on the cool-down lap, after Larson finally filled a 58-race void on drafting tracks and shook the long-running knock on his otherwise peerless portfolio. On a weekend when the 20th anniversary of “Talladega Nights” was celebrated around the namesake venue, the two-time Cup champ borrowed a quotable line from the film and truthfully had slingshot engaged.
“I felt like Dale Jr. out there with half the field kind of helping me,” Larson said post-race, noting the daylong show of Chevrolet solidarity and getting an Earnhardt-style rise out of the grandstand crowd.
That Chevrolet kinship only lasted so long, though, and after the white flag unfurled, each driver’s agendas turned more to me-first. Austin Hill’s No. 33 Richard Childress Racing Chevy had faithfully pushed Larson’s No. 5 out front, but dove to the low side exiting Turn 2, shucking the points leader into the middle lane and starting his last-lap decline.
Larson plummeted outside of the top 10 before suddenly regaining his groove. He finally found drafting support from Ross Chastain’s No. 1 Trackhouse Racing Camaro and steadily advanced in the low lane while the front of the pack duked it out with blocks and swerves.
“It was just full of surprise,” Larson said. “Like, there wasn’t anything special that I did. I didn’t really think on the last lap. It was honestly, like, more mistakes than anything that got me in that scenario. I don’t know. Maybe it was just meant to be and the mistake opened up the opportunity for me. Who knows how the race would have played out if I been leading my lane, not being put in the middle? Who knows? I might not have won, I might have crashed. It worked out how it was supposed to work out.”
“To be honest with you, off of Turn 2, I really thought that we were done,” Monn told NASCAR.com from Victory Lane, noting how Hill’s low-side parry broke Larson’s momentum. “… We just kept plugging middle, then got down to the bottom, just had a big run, and guys were all over the place. I think it just slowed the run up, and yeah, it was crazy just how big of a run we had down the front, and being able to get down to the bottom.
“Man, I’d have to watch the replay back, but just re-living through my head right now, I mean, it was unreal. Yeah, it was a great day overall. … To have a shot at it at the end was pretty phenomenal. And hey, it changed our luck.”
Luck, you say? Larson had stayed in contention virtually all day, benefiting from timely help in the aerodynamic draft from both his Hendrick Motorsports teammates and his fellow Chevrolet cohorts. He easily gathered the most stage points (16) of any Chase driver, placing fourth behind RFK Racing’s top-three sweep after a rogue Stage 1 strategy and coming home as the runner-up to Joey Logano in Stage 2.
Remarkably, the other 15 drivers in the 16-driver Chase field each had some sort of trouble — most of it bordering on disastrous. More Sundays than not at Talladega, that was Larson’s lot. This time, his No. 5 Chevrolet came out of the 500-mile maelstrom nearly showroom-fresh.
“All the carnage, it happens at ‘Dega. Kyle over the years has usually gotten caught up in that,” said Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon, a six-time Talladega winner in his Hall of Fame driving days. “We’ve had conversation over the year about how he feels about speedway races. We’ve seen the momentum shift a bit, the results get better recently. His confidence of OK, we can put good, solid results together in Talladega. Boom, today was one of those days where it all just went their way. They did their job. Now they come out of here with a win. Not only a win, we see where the points are at unofficially. I’m still in shock as to what took place today, the win and the points.”
The rest of The Chase field could say the same in a negative light, but that shoe fit Larson’s foot last weekend. The No. 5 team’s hopes had dimmed significantly at Phoenix Raceway, where atrocious handling eventually gave way to a downed tire and a late-race wall crunch. While Tyler Reddick cheered a win in Victory Lane and the rest of Larson’s challengers counted their gains, the No. 5 Chevrolet sat on jack stands in the Cup Series garage.
No. 5 crew chief Cliff Daniels took ownership last weekend, dutifully answering every question about what had gone wrong. Seven days later, the team captain was marveling over a whale of a final lap, having given his crew no time to dwell on the previous week’s mishaps.
“Once we kind of got through the disappointment we had on a Monday, we spent more time probably laughing and having fun preparing for Talladega this week than we’ve had in a long time,” Daniels said. “The spirit of the team was up. Everybody was positive. I’ve said this quote a couple times after the race already, but a smooth sea does not make for a skilled sailor. Even when you have those times of difficulty and the sea is rough, that’s when you have a good group of people that are willing to dig in and work together and believe in each other and the process that we built, and the team exercise that we continue to build on every week, there’s a lot of power in that. When you can unite and identify with that, I’m proud of the 5 team doing that this week and showing up prepared for this weekend.”
The prospects for Larson closing out the championship race early in the first year of the revised Chase postseason format are now on the doorstep, at a Martinsville track where Hendrick Motorsports has won a record 31 times.
Larson had joked with the motoring press before Saturday’s preliminaries about the collective rush to crown a championship favorite at various points as the 10-race Chase has unfolded. And though the Hendrick brass talked in terms of “plenty of racing left” and dodging the notion that the title is nearly a shoo-in, only a modest gain would clinch it — luck not required.
“A lot of momentum,” Monn said. “I mean, tomorrow we’ll be right back to work. We’ll talk a little bit about today, go over our post-race stuff, and then we’ll start working towards Martinsville and Homestead. … So we’ve just got to stay consistent. The job’s not done yet, and we’ve just got to keep doing the work. What this 5 team does week in and week out, even when we got knocked down after Phoenix last week, we stayed in it. You know, we had a 49-point lead going to Phoenix, left there with five, and then leave with 73 today. So we’ve just got to keep going, and the 5 team will never quit. That’s the attitude of this whole crew.”