The truest sign of humility has to be the ability to make fun of yourself.
When Kyle Larson logged on iRacing for the first time in quite awhile and asked for some setup sheets, he knew exactly what was going to come his way.
Flashback to the COVID shutdown of 2020: Larson was infamously fired by Chip Ganassi Racing and suspended by NASCAR for using a racial slur, the one with a hard R, and missed the remainder of that season to undergo sensitivity lessons while racing a variety of dirt disciplines until his return.
The incident in question took place on a Twitch stream of an iRacing event that featured several NASCAR stars. When Larson said the slur, followed by ‘Can you hear me,’ thinking it was on a private channel, everyone immediately told him they could all hear him.
Larson was also suspended from the iRacing platform at the time but that ban was lifted upon his NASCAR reinstatement.
Since then, Larson has done a tremendous amount of work with the Urban Racing Youth School, a non-profit designed to give inner-city kids the educational tools to encourage or enhance a love of motorsports. His work there has been praised by Bubba Wallace, currently the only black driver at the Cup Series level, a friend and occasional rival of Larson.
In other words, what happened is largely in the past, but Larson knew logging back onto iRacing in such a public manner was going to bring everything back to the surface so he had fun with it to get everyone to move on.
Even Wallace got in on the jokes.
The joke is that Larson logged onto iRacing, got suspended for the rest of the season and came back the next year and won the 2021 Cup Series championship for Hendrick Motorsports.
His latest iRacing endeavor took place without incident.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.