KWINANA BEACH, Western Australia — Kyle Larson has no idea how winning a second NASCAR Cup Series championship will affect his standing among his peers.
“I haven’t been back in the NASCAR garage,” Larson said before hot laps and qualifying on Dec. 29, the second preliminary night of High Limit International racing at the Perth Motorplex, where he was defending his 2024 win in Australia’s richest sprint car race.
“Once you win the championship, everybody kind of disappears and does their own thing, so you really don’t notice it until you get back into the garage … It’s a big deal, but you really don’t see the respect from it that much until you get back to Daytona or I guess the Clash at Bowman Gray (Feb. 1).”
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Larson won his second Cup title in November at Phoenix Raceway, becoming only the third full-time active driver in the series to hold more than one championship in NASCAR’s top division. Joey Logano leads with three titles, and Kyle Busch has two.
But make no mistake. Though his level of recognition may be delayed in the Cup garage, Larson already is an international superstar whose global impact has been growing exponentially.
Tony Clarke, an 80-year-old from Adelaide in South Australia, watched the broadcast of last year’s High Limit Racing event in Perth last year. Subsequently, he followed some of Larson’s exploits in Cup racing and in the Indianapolis 500.
Larson’s winning performance in the High Limits feature motivated Clarke to drive 1,600 miles across the continent through barren land where gas stations are 350 miles apart and cellular phone service is sketchy at best.
The trip took 28 hours and “two sleeps” in the car, as Clarke put it.
“I want to see Kyle Larson,” he said.
Told of Clarke’s journey, Larson shook his head in wonderment.
“Having the success I’ve been able to fortunately have in NASCAR the past five seasons or whatever has helped all of this,” Larson said. “I think it’s all helped translate to growing racing — NASCAR, sprint cars, even the dirt late model stuff when I was in that.
“I think racing’s just in a healthy spot right now. So, yes, it’s pretty neat to have fans travel from very far distances, within this country and even outside the country, to come watch myself race but get a chance to see others they may not have heard about yet.”
Wherever Larson goes, his reputation precedes him. Often called a “generational talent,” his success in a wide array of racing machines has defined his career.
The 2025 season was emblematic. Larson started the year by winning a Golden Driller Trophy in the Tulsa Shootout for micro sprints and followed that with his third title in the Chili Bowl Nationals for midget race cars.
Driving the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, Larson won three Cup Series races and claimed the title in November by holding off Denny Hamlin after a late restart and finishing third behind Ryan Blaney and Brad Keselowski.
Larson capped the 2025 campaign with his second straight victory in the High Limit International main event in Perth, pocketing $110,000 in Australian dollars for the sprint car win.
That’s not to say that 2025 wasn’t without its disappointments. Larson’s second attempt at the Indianapolis 500/Coca-Cola 600 double ended badly and likely took its toll on the usually resilient driver.
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“You think about the double, the month of May, the 600,” Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon said after the championship race at Phoenix. “It’s the first time I saw his confidence brought down a notch. I think it was a humbling experience.”
Throughout the season, Larson insisted that there was no hangover from the double attempt. In retrospect, he acknowledged there might have been.
“I would say ‘No,’ but then it’s hard to argue with the timing of all that,” said Larson, who didn’t win a Cup Series race after taking the checkered flag at Kansas Speedway on May 11. “I had a great season going to that point, then had a couple of bad weeks at Indy and went into the 600, and then all my racing kind of took a dip — Cup racing, sprint car racing, all that.
“You could argue that, OK, our cars took a dip in performance as well, but still … I guess maybe it did, but it was just bad timing — I don’t know. It did seem to all kind of come crashing down for a couple of months, but you’ve got to stick with the process and stay confident in yourself, your team and the people around you. I think that’s what makes the championship at the end of the year extremely meaningful.”
