It’s been quite a two-week journey but things are back to where they were for Kyle Larson prior to his tumultuous Memorial Day Weekend Double attempt.
He is in Victory Lane and leading the NASCAR Cup Series championship standings.
Between, there was missing the Coca-Cola 600 due to a rain delay prior to the Indianapolis 500 and the potential that NASCAR would strip Larson of his playoff eligibility. While NASCAR ultimately granted the playoff waiver, it created a great deal of discourse. There was a top-10 at Gateway but one that involved a run-in with Kyle Busch along the way too.
Larson fell to third in the championship standings after Memorial Day, which was effectively a potential eight-point penalty, but he’s made that back up after winning on Sunday at Sonoma Raceway, too.
“My mind never wavered,” Larson said.
Get it? Waiver’d.
“It was always kind of focused on executing and winning the regular season points, whether that be on the owner’s side or whatever. My mindset has not changed at all. I race to win every single race, so yeah, I haven’t really thought any differently since missing Charlotte.”
He says that, but his direct supervisor, four-time champion Jeff Gordon says his resolve was not quite as steely as he tries to play it off.
“I definitely saw a little bit more in him than maybe he’s letting on, too, of some of the concerns when Monday came around,” Gordon said. “I kept telling him not to worry, but I was worried, too.”
But Gordon also said the noise never became a distraction for those at the shop. Instead, it was a headache for himself, crew chief Cliff Daniels, Jeff Andrews, Chad Knaus and Rick Hendrick.
“They seemed to be business as usual and prepping for the next race, the next two races, the way they normally do,” Gordon said. “I think the best medicine in any of those situations is getting back to the racetrack. Especially when they got here, home track for Kyle, and I think a track that they enjoy racing at, and a lot of the competitors do too.
“I think that put a lot of that to rest.”
Winning puts all of it to rest as Larson now has the regular season championship lead, is also now leading the playoff point standings and is well positioned to be the No. 1 seed once the Cup Series playoffs begin in September.
It also helped that Denny Hamlin, the points leader since Memorial Day, dropped an engine two laps into the race. It was almost like missing a race himself.
“Their misfortune today really helps, but we still just have to stay executing and trying to get great stage points, get race wins, obviously, stage wins, all that,” Larson said. Yeah, we’ve done a great job executing, so just got to keep that up.”
A tale of two races
At one point, early in the second stage of the race, the average speed was just under 50 mph as it was on pace for a track record number of caution … easily.
There were seven cautions across the first 40 laps, and the track record was nine back in 1990, but there was only one other caution after that and it was for the second stage break. The final 51 laps went green.
It was like watching two different races on the newly paved Northern California road course.
But that first half featured Ty Gibbs crushing his right front on the new Turn 11 hairpin Jersey Barriers.
“I was finding grip down there and was making up time, and then got too close and clipped the wall and hurt the right front,” Gibbs said. “I just made a mistake and took us out.”
There were a pair of multi-car parking lot incidents. One, at the start of the second stage, involved Bubba Wallace going wide and onto the dirt. At the same time, Josh Berry blocked Erik Jones into the hairpin barrier, bouncing off it and into the field.
Austin Dillon, Josh Berry, Corey LaJoie, Noah Gragson, Martin Truex, Jr., Christopher Bell, William Byron, Daniel Hemric, Justin Haley, and Cam Waters all caught damage.
“[Berry] and [Jones], I don’t know what that is — [Berry] struggled all weekend,” Dillon said. “We broke the suspension in the right rear when we took the hit.”
On Lap 40, a section of tire barrier needed to be repaired when contact between Austin Cindric and Noah Gragson sent both into the protective lining.
At the same time, Michael McDowell received a tag from behind by Justin Haley, which sent the Front Row Ford into the barrier as well.
And then came the second half, 51 consecutive green flag laps, that actually created quite the challenge for crew chiefs.
One one hand, there was a realistic expectation of more cautions as there had been so many to that point. On the other, teams had no tire degradation data on the freshly paved surface and didn’t know how hard they could push these tires, as illustrated by Daniels.
“With the repave, ‘do you get tire blisters’ and ‘do your tires go 15 laps, do they go 30 laps,’ and the unknowns were more on the tire side. So knowing how to strategize around that two-stop or three-stop really for the whole day.
“That was actually fun because it changed everything everybody had in their mindset for how to understand pace, falloff, all those things, that it just changed the factors that you had to solve for. People could do things differently. We were completely off script with the way that we called the race, but that was fun.”
Larson was tasked with driving through the field, on newer tires, while Martin Truex tried to get past Chris Buescher on equal older tires. The mix of clean air, versus fresher tires, over a long run made for a compelling pure road course race.
Buescher just didn’t have enough to hold on.
“If you had told us at the beginning of the day that we’d be able to win a stage and come home with a third-place finish, I think we would’ve been pretty dang happy with that,” Buescher said. “So, trying to remember that side from six hours ago and enjoy it. But yeah, when you’re close, you’re always gonna think about what-ifs.
“Ultimately, if we would have started a lot farther forward, it may have opened up better opportunities for us to have some fresher tires and to fight for it a little better there at the end.”
There was even a fuel mileage element as Truex ran out of fuel in the final corner, falling from second to 27th. Kyle Busch was spun by Ross Chastain for fifth, running out of fuel as a result, himself falling to 12th in the final order.
“A couple of guys there at the end of the race had better tires than we did but we were going to have a good day,” Busch said in a RCR press release. “Unfortunately, one of those guys got into us on the last lap and ruined our day. It’s frustrating to not get the finish that we deserved.”
Chastain apologized for a wheelhop.
Points update
The end result will produce mixed feelings for Busch, because on one hand, he actually gained on Wallace for the final spot but actually would have surpassed him if not for the last lap incident.
It continues the theme of a generally awful month for Busch where their best runs aren’t rewarded or they simply don’t have the speed needed to content.
Joey Logano led early from the pole but got crashed once he surrendered his track position early with the goal of splitting the stage. Chase Briscoe was involved in a crash and fell closer towards a must-win scenario as well.
McDowell is already in a must-win scenario and made his fuel mileage last to a second place run on Sunday. If not for being spun earlier, he thinks he might have had a shot at it.
“There’s a lot of strategies going on, so it’s hard to know from the driver’s seat where you’re at and who is going to be where because there’s just so many different strategies,” McDowell said. “But as it started to cycle out, I knew that we had to run down the leaders, and we had fresher tires than some of them, but Larson had the freshest tires of all, so it just didn’t go our way.
“I think if we could have kept our track position there and not had to come back down pit road to fix the damage, we would have had 10 or so more spots forward, and that would’ve been 10 less cars that I had to pass to get to the front.”
But he also still believes he’s going to win this year too.
“We’re close. I believe wholeheartedly we will win a race before the end of this regular season,” McDowell said. “We have the speed, and we have the team to do it. We just have to put it all together.”
Overall, with 10 races remaining in the regular season, here’s the provisional grid.
Kyle Larson (3W)
Denny Hamlin (3W)
William Byron (3W)
Christopher Bell (2W)
Chase Elliott W
Tyler Reddick W
Brad Keselowski W
Austin Cindric W
Daniel Suarez W
Martin Truex Jr. +128
Ty Gibbs +86
Ross Chastain +73
Alex Bowman +65
Ryan Blaney +74
Chris Buescher +32
Bubba Wallace +8
—
Kyle Busch -8
Joey Logano -16
Chase Briscoe -27
Luckless aces from Oz
Given the success of Shane Van Gisbergen, fellow Supercars aces Will Brown and Cam Waters made their Cup Series debuts on Sunday to much fanfare for Richard Childress Racing and RFK Racing respectively.
Neither fared particularly well for reasons not of their making.
Brown, the Supercars points leader, suffered electrical problems all weekend in the RCR No. 33 while Waters was crashed out early in the race.
There was optimism for both, but especially Brown, who was third fastest in practice and looked capable of contending. Those early electrical gremlin cost him in qualifying as well. Waters, who made two Truck Series starts earlier in the season, showed pace but just suffered from his own misfortune.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.