Kyle Larson Showing Signs of Regaining Championship Form

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Bob Pockrass

FOX Motorsports Insider

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KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Kyle Larson attended Kansas City Chiefs practice Friday prior to his race weekend at the nearby Kansas Speedway.

The scene: A driver used to winning hanging out with players who are used to winning. And all of them used to questions about their performance — the Chiefs had started the season 1-2 and Larson, after a quick start, had not won since May in the NASCAR Cup Series’ previous visit to Kansas.

Larson learned about preparation — he sat in on the quarterbacks meeting — and knows just like him, that the preparation to compete is intense no matter the result.

“I just look at big buff football players, and I’m like, ‘Oh, they just probably have a couple meetings during the week, a couple practices, and just lift and get big and strong,’” Larson said. “But it sounds like their weeks are really long.

“There’s a lot of prep work, it sounds like a lot of meetings. I would say by game day, they’re extremely prepared, so that was really neat to see — just how much effort goes into prepping for a single game. That was just eye-opening. It’s neat to see the culture and leadership that goes on there, and it makes sense why they’re so successful.”

Larson wasn’t as successful as the victorious Chiefs were on Sunday, but with his sixth-place finish at Kansas, it appears Larson is getting closer to the form he displayed early in the year when he won three of the first 12 races and led the series standings well into July.

“We had a really good race car, probably the best race car we’ve had in a long time, since probably Charlotte earlier this year [in May],” Larson said. “I’m happy with the speed that we brought. I just didn’t do the best job with what I had on the restarts.”

The Hendrick driver has a 54-point cushion on the cutline heading into the quarterfinal round elimination race Sunday at the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course. He should have no problem advancing to the semifinal round.

“That [cushion] is good, but you’re never completely comfortable unless you’ve got a win under your belt,” Larson said.

Larson opened the playoffs with three finishes outside the top-10 but has finishes of seventh and sixth in this round as well as having scored points in finishing in the top-10 in each of the stages of both races.

“It’s probably been our weakest playoffs of my career, at least at Hendrick Motorsports,” Larson said prior to the race at Kansas. “Going through the first round with zero top-10s was not something that we expected. But we still gained good points throughout the first two races of that round, which was good.

“We just didn’t get the race finishes that we’ve had in the past. … We still have a lot of racing left to get back to what we’ve been. I feel like we are getting better and better each week. Although it may be little improvements, it’s still stacking, and hopefully it kind of peaks at the right time.”

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The 2021 Cup champion led more than 20 laps in five of the first 13 races of the season. He has led more than 20 laps just once in the last 19 events. But has started to show more speed as he has started in the top-five in five of the last six races.

Hendrick Motorsports executive vice president Jeff Gordon said the margin of error with the Next Gen car is so small, that it doesn’t take much for a driver to get a tick off the pace.

“You’re talking thousandths of an inch that make the difference sometimes between qualifying in the top-five and qualifying 15th to 20th,” Gordon said. “It just doesn’t take much to miss it. … You’re just playing with hairs, and when you miss it, it can really make you look like you’re having a bad day.”

Some would say that Larson entered the playoffs still with a hangover from a frustrating May that followed that Kansas win. He crashed out of both the Indianapolis 500 (his third crash of his month testing, practice and racing an INDYCAR in his attempted the Memorial Day weekend double) and the NASCAR race at Charlotte.

“It didn’t go the way I wanted it to — both the Indy 500 and the Coke 600, but I don’t know [its impact],” Larson said. “I always do a good job of not letting it affect me so I would like to think that it didn’t.

“But I don’t know if it was coincidence or if it was really a thing. You just never really know.”

Larson felt the windless summer stretch motivated his team going into the playoffs.

“”We took a dip in our performance on the Cup side,” Larson said. “Even my sprint-car stuff there for a few weeks was off a little bit. … It [was] a rough couple, two and a half months.

“But I think through that all, we’ve become stronger as a team because we’ve been through a lot,”

The results haven’t been the only adversity that Larson’s team has faced this year. It overhauled his over-the-wall pit crew during the early part of the season. The team’s public relations representative, Jon Edwards, unexpectedly died in April. And then he had his frustrating May.

“I don’t know what other teams have dealt with, but I don’t know if there’s a team that’s dealt with more than we have with losing a team member, pit crew swaps, different personnel changes,” Larson said. “There’s just a lot that we’ve had to overcome, but I feel like we’ve worked really hard and although the results may not show it all the time, I feel like we are building and better than we were, say in June, for sure.”

And he thinks they can get back to where they were at Kansas in May.

“I didn’t have as much hope as I had in May when we were running really, really well,” Larson said a week prior to Kansas. “I’m still not quite to there, probably, which our results don’t show that we should either.

“I’m confident in my team and the people and the group of all the hundreds of men and women at Hendrick Motorsports that have been working really hard. I feel like we are close. It’s just got to all come together.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.

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