KANSAS CITY, Kan. — For a team that spent the better part of the NASCAR season getting grilled, the barbecue in Kansas Speedway’s Victory Lane had to be all the more satisfying for Kyle Larson and his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports group.
The line of questioning around Larson’s defense of his second Cup Series title has since made a dramatic turn. Until recently, “Why haven’t you won?” was the prevailing thought (though often more delicately phrased) as a 51-race drought hung on the shoulders of Larson and his No. 5 Chevrolet team in a so-called “off year.” All through the regular season, Larson insisted there was no cause for alarm, knowing how Hendrick’s historically battle-tested tendencies and talent have responded when resilience was needed. Team owner Rick Hendrick said the same in a summit with all four teams before the postseason began, reaffirming his belief in their efforts and trying to defuse the internal pressure created by long periods of grinding it out.
Safe to say, the lead car in that quartet has found some answers.
Larson and Co. delivered a maximum-points master class Sunday at Kansas Speedway, keeping their brilliant start to this season’s 10-race Chase steamrolling forward, landing a jolt to Toyota’s yearlong dominance and firming up his footing atop the Cup Series heap. The recent plot twist suggests a newfound tilt to the circuit’s balance of power, and the questions around the team now center on just how far Larson can go.
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“I think we’re certainly more in the ballpark,” No. 5 crew chief Cliff Daniels said of his team’s gains, moments after Larson’s romp in Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 knocked a towering home run out of the yard. That old-school stomping touched off a spirited Victory Lane celebration, with Daniels — the team’s normally reserved signal-caller — chasing his crew around Larson’s winning car with champagne spray engaged.
Larson now sits in command of The Chase presented by Mobil 1 after landing his second win in a three-race span and opening the postseason with four consecutive top fives. He led a whopping 235 of the 267 laps, swept the stage wins and bagged the Xfinity Fastest Lap bonus — all adding up to a fully optimized 76-point day that put the rest of The Chase field on its heels.
Toyota teams have been dining out on the perception of Hendrick’s inferiority for most of 2026, winning 14 of the 26 regular-season races and gobbling up most of the postseason’s higher seeds once the points were reset. The automaker was heralded as the favorite, not just in The Chase but in Sunday’s Kansas showdown, which kicked off a pivotal midway stretch of three consecutive 1.5-mile tracks.
Larson embarked on the 10-race final span as a stealthy seventh seed, with Hendrick teammates Chase Elliott (eighth) and William Byron (13th) also in unfamiliar territory behind the Cup Series front-runners. Rather than dwell on those negatives, Daniels says the No. 5 team stuck to its no-panic approach, fully aware that the competition ebbs and flows, and that Hendrick holds a patent in orchestrating peerless postseason runs.
“Nobody wants to go through the struggle, but the struggle can be so constructive, if you let it be, if you lean in the right ways,” Daniels said after Larson’s 34th Cup win. “We have a great company with a lot of great people on the shop floor that are in the teams, engine shop, car shop, leadership. Everybody kind of having the check of, OK, we’re not where we need to be, so let’s not play the blame game. Let’s look within, and how do we elevate our process, our setups, just digging into all the things you have to do. You guys have seen this for a long time. The sport goes in cycles. Somebody told me a long time ago, when the sport goes in cycles, when you’re on top, you’ve got to take the best of it; and when you’re not, you’ve got to be patient and be ready when it is your turn.
“I feel like we’ve shown a decent amount of patience. At the same time, we’ve been patient, just from the emotional level of not letting the struggle really keep us down. We’ve been passionate in the pursuit, passionate in putting in the work that now, honestly, my opinion, I still don’t think as a company we’ve peaked yet. I don’t think as a team we’ve peaked yet. There’s still a lot of racing left and a lot of work to do.”
Sunday was indeed Larson’s turn, and if there’s still room for the team to peak, as Daniels claims, it’s a daunting prospect for the rest of the title hopefuls. The two-time Cup Series champion grabbed the top spot in the standings from top-seeded Denny Hamlin the previous weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway by one point, but added 25 points to that total at Kansas with a maxed-out, perfect-day performance.
Chase Briscoe — winner at the most recent 1.5-mile track, Chicagoland Speedway, in July — was the foremost Toyota driver to mount a sustained challenge to Larson’s Sunday reign. When he briefly lurched in front after a furious charge in the final stage, it appeared he was destined to play spoiler. After one too many late-race scrapes with the outside wall, his bid unraveled.
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Larson countered Briscoe at most every turn, rallying to retake the lead with seven laps remaining. He also countered the No. 19 team’s pit strategy with a quick dive to pit road with Briscoe on Lap 216, and the No. 5 over-the-wall crew responded by holding serve and keeping Larson up front after their final service.
“That’s why we’re here. That’s the moments that we live for,” said Allen Stallings Jr., the No. 5 team’s tire carrier. With their execution complete, Larson did the rest, and the memory of their regular-season woes continued to fade.
“I mean, we’ve been struggling all year, but the fight has been there,” Stallings said. “I feel like the hard work has been constantly put in week in and week out. I mean, I think at the end of the day, we knew we needed to catch fire right at the right time, and I think we’re starting to do that. So today was just a good day all around — the car was good, our pit stops were good, strategy was good. It just kind of all came together today.”
The outcome was confounding to the rest of Toyota camp, which now has their own questions — some with greater urgency than others. Hamlin did virtually everything he needed short of winning, collecting 17 stage points with top-three finishes at each segment and coming home a solid third overall. He still left Kansas with a 25-point hit in the standings, thanks to Larson’s win.
“Yeah, I mean he’s got the point lead. He’s definitely in control when he got it,” Hamlin said. “I mean, I think that we’re right there. We have finished right where we run every race. You know, there’s a few where maybe we finished a little better than what we were. I mean, Darlington’s the exception, but this is where we’re at right now on speed, and until we get a little bit faster in the short run, we’re gonna kind of finish right where we’re at.”
The regrouping process may need more drastic measures further down the board. Tyler Reddick, the winner here in May, lost 15 positions in the first eight laps, and his No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota dropped as low as 34th in the opening stage. With major adjustments, he eventually rallied back into the top five by Sunday’s final segment, but the 11th-place result he salvaged was small consolation.
“I mean, running [11th] on an intermediate race track isn’t really anything we should be proud of, honestly,” Reddick said. “I mean, we fought to get back up in there, but we still just didn’t have the speed we need to have at these intermediate tracks here.”
Losing a net 50 points to Larson’s lead raises the degree of difficulty for Reddick’s title hopes, but the one-time championship favorite had more fundamental concerns.
“Yeah, I mean … we got big problems,” Reddick said. “We’ve just got to figure our own (expletive) out right now and just not even be worried about that.”
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The rest of the field faces similar, sizable deficits. When Briscoe briefly lunged ahead, a look at the live Cup Series standings projected only moderate losses across the 16-driver field, had the eighth-place driver in the standings prevailed. Instead, all but two drivers — Hamlin and a resurgent runner-up in Austin Cindric — lost 30 or more points, and half the field plummeted by a 45-points-plus margin.
Both Larson and Daniels cautioned that Sunday’s showing — however dominant — didn’t guarantee a hurdle-free path to Cup Series coronation, with plenty of racing to come in the six races that remain. The full impact of this year’s shift to The Chase format is also still taking shape, with the potential for more wild momentum swings in the offing the rest of the way.
Still, the performance felt like the start of what could be a seismic shift, given Hendrick’s knack for attending to every detail.
“Yeah, we struggled for a good portion of the beginning of the year,” Larson said, “but it forced us to kind of work hard and zero in on the fine details to make us good.”
Those regular-season questions and doubts seem especially distant after a day when Larson, Daniels and the rest of the No. 5 team had all the answers.