Kyle Larson had led 228 laps at Kansas Speedway on Sunday when Chase Briscoe ran him down and took the lead on Lap 238. For 23 laps, the Hollywood Casino 400 belonged to somebody else. On Lap 261, Larson dove to the inside of Briscoe's Toyota, took the lead back and held it for the last seven laps.
Larson's win, the 34th of his NASCAR Cup Series career, came with everything attached. He won the first two of the race's three stages, led 235 of 267 laps and turned the fastest lap of the race, which added up to 76 points, the most a driver can score in one race. He entered Sunday leading the Chase, NASCAR's 10-race run for the championship, by one point over Denny Hamlin. He leaves Kansas City leading by 26.
Austin Cindric finished second, 0.565 seconds back. Hamlin was third, Briscoe fourth and Ryan Blaney fifth.
How he lost it, and how he got it back
Larson controlled most of the afternoon. Rain wiped out qualifying, so the field was set by NASCAR's rule-book formula, which put him second. He took the lead from pole-sitter Joey Logano on the first lap and was out front for 128 straight laps in the middle of the race.
The last round of pit stops under green is where it got interesting. On Lap 216, Briscoe's team called him to pit road from second place. Larson's crew chief, Cliff Daniels, heard the call and brought the No. 5 in on the same lap. "Credit to the guys in our war room and our engineer here," Daniels said. "They do what we all do to play the game, and you scan the other guy. We heard them call it out over the radio late trying to probably keep us from hearing it and making it to pit road in time."
The move kept Larson in front after the stops. It did not keep him there. According to the NASCAR Wire Service, Larson scraped the wall early in the final run, and Briscoe closed from 1.5 seconds back and passed him on Lap 238.
Larson said he figured that was the race. "I really didn't think that I could win after Briscoe got by," he said afterward. Once Briscoe passed him, he said, his thinking was simple: "I'm like, okay, now he's going to drive away. And let's just settle in, take our second, try not to lose second throughout this run."
Briscoe did not drive away. His car got loose, meaning the rear end started to slide, and Larson stayed about five car lengths behind him and waited. "I think it's just easier to be the hunter rather than the hunted," Larson said in his interview on the frontstretch.
Briscoe said the car had started to get loose on the run before, too. "I got it in the wall so many times that I had a little bit of a leak. Just went really, really free ultimately," he said. After Larson got by, Cindric and Hamlin did too.
Larson said Cindric "potentially had probably the best car arguably for the second half of a run." Cindric lost ground by pitting one lap after the leaders, came out 4.6 seconds back and spent the rest of the race chasing. "When you only lose by half a second, I wish I would have had at least a shot at it," Cindric said.
Where the Chase stands
This is the first year of the new Chase: 16 drivers, 10 races and no eliminations along the way. Kansas was race four. Here is the top five with six to go (full Cup standings):
- Kyle Larson, 2,282 points
- Denny Hamlin, 26 behind
- Christopher Bell, 50 behind
- Joey Logano, 67 behind
- Ryan Blaney, 91 behind
Everybody else is at least 111 points back, and Daniel Suarez, in 16th, is 187 behind. For scale, Larson scored 76 points on Sunday and Cindric, the runner-up, scored 52.
Larson has finished fifth at Darlington, first at World Wide Technology Raceway, second at Bristol and first at Kansas. Before Kansas, the NASCAR Wire Service noted he was the only driver with a top five in each of the first three. Now he has four. It is his second win in three weeks, after a 51-race winless stretch that ended at World Wide Technology Raceway on Sept. 13.
Logano, who started on the pole, finished 20th and fell from third to fourth. Carson Hocevar was caught in a six-car wreck on a restart on Lap 122, finished 33rd and dropped to 11th, 150 points out.
So is it over? Larson laughed at that one. "No, no," he said. "There's still six races, and I only have a 26, I think, point lead on Denny. That could be swallowed up in a hurry." Then he laid out exactly how, pointing to Noah Gragson, whose engine let go after 112 laps on Sunday: "Denny could go have a max points day next week, and I could blow an engine, like Noah did in the first stage, and I'm down 70-some points right there."
The numbers behind it
The win was Larson's fourth at Kansas and ties him with Kurt Busch and Martin Truex Jr. for 26th on the all-time Cup wins list, according to the NASCAR Wire Service. "Those are two champions that I've gotten to compete against and have had lots of great battles and wins against them, losses against them," Larson said.
He also did not want anybody reading too much into one weekend. Because he started on the front row without having to qualify, and he said the race might have looked different from farther back. "The weekend could have looked quite a bit different if, say, I qualify seventh," he said.
Next up is Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday, Oct. 4, another mile-and-a-half track. Larson said he expects to run somewhere in the top five to seven there, and he had one more prediction. "I'm sure it's not going to rain in Vegas," he said, "so we're going to get to qualify."