Now that Kyle Larson has broken through for his first NASCAR Cup Series win of the season, Kevin Harvick said that’s bad news for the rest of the field hoping to keep wins off his plate this season.
“This is a dangerous win for the rest of the field,” Harvick said on his Happy Hour podcast. “I feel like he really balanced not having the best car, being aggressive two inches or on the wall all day, managed traffic, managed a pit road incident, damage to the car. These are the types of days that could really put Kyle Larson in the thought process of being in a position to win on days when he doesn’t have the best car.
“This was one of those days where he just grounded out and by the end of the race, had the 12 car [Blaney] — who I thought was the fastest car — out of the race. We had a couple other cars that didn’t really perform like we thought — [Tyler] Reddick being one of them — and he wound up in a position to where it was longest run at the end of the race.”
Blaney unarguably had the best car on Sunday afternoon. The Penske No. 12 led a race high 124 laps but suffered an engine failure with 60 laps remaining, the second time in three weeks that he suffered such an outcome.
What impressed Harvick the most was that Larson won on an afternoon where he wasn’t given a dominant car. He simply drove it to the front in the laps that mattered the most.
“His strength was against the wall as we always know, and it put Alex Bowman in a position to where he needed to get up in Larson’s line to protect and when you don’t run that line all day, you can’t just go up there and be that fast right off the bat. Wound up putting pressure on Alex,” Harvick said. “He got in the fence and made an easy pass for Larson.
“Very dangerous day for the rest of the field to see Kyle Larson starting to manage a car in a situation that’s not fast, not tear up his car, not make a mistake and then win the race. That is something we haven’t seen Kyle Larson do a lot. I think he thought he’d go to Homestead and probably be in a position to be one of the dominant cars. [That was] never the case all day. To see that performance, that could be dangerous as we go forward.”
