HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Even Kyle Larson admitted that the way he clinched his third NASCAR Cup Series championship verged toward buzzkill. The 34-year-old California kid salted a hard-fought title away in an abbreviated Stage 1, with nary a “WOO!” or even a lower-case “woo” over the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet’s radio. The championship stage wouldn’t be wheeled to the frontstretch for nearly 190 laps, and the whirring of calculators was the clinch soundtrack instead of fireworks.
“Uh, they’ve declared it. We got it,” said Cliff Daniels, the No. 5 team’s ever-reliable crew chief.
“Like, it’s done?” asked Larson.
“It’s over.”
“OK, that was a little anticlimactic,” Larson said, “but that’s cool. Good job, guys.”
As understated a radio moment as it was, the sense of accomplishment that accompanied one of the most celebrated 12th-place finishes in recent memory should be trumpeted to the Homestead-Miami Speedway rafters. Larson took out all the guesswork early in Sunday’s Cup Series season finale, giving the heralded 1.5-mile track another entry in its rich history of crowning champions.
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There’s no understating where Larson ranks now in the conversation among stock-car racing’s all-time greats. Getting just one Cup title is an achievement in itself — a feat that many fine racers aren’t fortunate enough to taste. Winning two moves the needle into the next stage of elite. Now as just the 11th driver to reach three championships in NASCAR’s top division, there’s an easy association with some of the sport’s immortals — Yarborough, Waltrip, Stewart, Pearson, Logano.
His ability to excel in other disciplines of racing, however, has placed Larson on a separate, lofty plateau. At Richmond, Larson expressed his faith in Hendrick Motorsports’ process after some early struggles, trusting that both he and the team would have the ability to turn around their fortunes at the most critical time in the postseason. It was also at Richmond where he ran 300 miles, bolted from his No. 5 Chevy to fly halfway across the country to claim his fourth Knoxville Nationals triumph in the wee hours of a damp Iowa morning.
NASCAR, IndyCar, sprint car. Larson has demonstrated searing speed in all, much in the way legends with names like Foyt and Andretti once did. No less an authority than four-time Cup champ Jeff Gordon said it’s time to put his driver’s name alongside those icons.
“In our eyes, he’s there, right?” said Gordon, Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman. “We see what he accomplishes and everything he gets in. It’s hard to pick the most impressive thing that he does because he gets in an IndyCar, he goes fast. Sprint car, he’ll fly overnight, get in the car, go win Knoxville, then come back and win the Brickyard, hop in the car and fly the next day in the stock car. That’s rare air. Very rare. So few guys that are capable of doing that, or even get the opportunity to do that. Whatever stats he needs to accumulate, OK, if that’s what it takes. I think he’s already there.”
Once the championship race became a mathematical inevitability, team owner Rick Hendrick — who had fretted each time early on when Larson tempted calamity in his search for speed up against the outside wall — finally keyed the No. 5 radio to loosen the reins. “Congratulations, champ,” he said. “Now you can ride the wall.”
With newfound freedom, Larson began ripping along the outer barrier without objection — to the detriment of his car’s scuffed right side, but to the delight of those watching his breathless derring-do. His skillset has always felt like a perfect match to Homestead’s high-banked sweeping turns, where the reward/risk balance of running the highest of lines has lured some of the sport’s bravest.
According to race winner Ryan Blaney, one of his generation’s peers, that wasn’t always the case.
“Right when he got in the sport, he kind of changed the game. He’s one of those guys,” Blaney said, noting how he’d pointed this out years ago when the two drivers were marketed heavily in a “they’ve got next” program. “… He revolutionized running the wall. I don’t know if anyone knows that. Go look up when Kyle Larson came into the Cup Series in like ’14 or even before, was then the Nationwide Series, nobody ran the fence like that. Everyone would kind of go in the middle, fade up to the top, come off of it. Kyle was one of the first guys I’ve ever seen just park it entering, two inches off the wall, and not getting two inches off the wall the whole way. That was a talent like I’d never seen before personally. …
“I think he’s really good at finding the edge,” Blaney added. “He used to step over it a lot in his early days. He would always be at the edge, take himself out of contention. As he’s gotten older, more experienced, he’s really refined that skill of he’s still on the edge but he definitely doesn’t go over it a lot. That’s really dangerous for the rest of us. Obviously he’s incredibly talented. His natural, God-given talent is off the charts. He is very deserving to win his third championship. That group makes it very hard on everybody in the garage. They’re a very good team. Everyone has their work cut out for them to keep contending with that group, specifically that pairing of Kyle, Cliff, all those guys.”
That talent came to its brightest focus under the spotlight of the sport’s first go-round with a new-look Chase format. The freshened postseason structure rewarded winning and consistency, and Larson and the No. 5 team delivered on both in epic fashion, rising from a seventh-seed slot to take a commanding lead. Larson shook off a regular-season slump with victories at Gateway, Kansas and of all places Talladega, where his unlikely charge erased all doubt about the strength of his title candidacy.
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With three titles in a six-year span and the amped-up performance over this year’s final 10 races, the parallels to another Hendrick dynasty were bound to be drawn. Jimmie Johnson secured all seven of his record-tying Cup Series championships here and was the last to go back-to-back, and Daniels was a key component to the No. 48 team’s repeated success — prosperity he’s enjoying with a team he now leads. Even Denny Hamlin — among Larson’s closest challengers this year — was quick to connect all those dots.
“I mean, just an exceptional talent. He’s this generation’s Jimmie, right?” said Hamlin, who ended up third in the final Cup Series standings. “I mean, I think that’s the only way you can kind of describe it. Just when it comes to playoff time, they perform their best, and that’s something that Jimmie used to do. And you know, Jimmie was a guy that could get tons of speed out of car. Kyle’s the same way, you could argue even more speed. There’s a little bit more variance in the results because of how hard he pushes it, but he reaps the benefits because he gets lots of wins, and that’s something that certainly he’s going to be winning championships and races well beyond when I’m gone from here. But it’s been fun to really race against him and see how really he’s gotten better and matured over the last 10 years on the race track.”
And that’s where the conversation goes as NASCAR traipses into its offseason break, even with the trophy-shaped confetti still freshly flown — just how many more titles Larson & Co. can accumulate. Richard Petty’s seven Cup championships were once thought of as an unbreakable record until the rise of Dale Earnhardt. Those two stood alone for more than two decades until Johnson stunningly made it a three-man crowd of seven-timers, complete with his own unprecedented five-in-a-row burner.
Now Gordon can only smile as Larson makes gains on his own Hall of Fame credentials, but potentially on others with first-ballot, Mount Rushmore and GOAT cred. Anticlimactic? Hardly.
“He’s going to pass me. I already came to that conclusion,” Gordon said, grinning. “Kind of knew that when he was going to Hendrick Motorsports. He’s special. But yeah, no, it was one of the first things that I said to him when I saw him today. All right, there you go, number three, one more to go.”