Kyle Larson acknowledged he was looking ahead to Bristol Motor Speedway, but the end of his 51-race drought came a week earlier than he expected.
Fresh from his NASCAR Cup Series victory at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway — and just nine points behind Chase leader Denny Hamlin — Larson brings renewed confidence to Saturday’s Bass Pro Shops Night Race (7:30 p.m. ET on USA, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“I did not think that I would break the streak here,” Larson said after taking the checkered flag at WWT Raceway last Sunday. “I was more looking at next week (Bristol), but this definitely built some momentum, and we just have to keep it going.
“There’s still a lot of racing left, but we need more days like today.”
Under the lights at Bristol, Larson and Hamlin will go head-to-head at a track where both have had success. Larson has posted seven top fives—including all three of his career victories—in the last eight races at Thunder Valley.
Hamlin has four wins at the 0.533-mile, high-banked concrete track, including three victories in the Night Race. The driver of the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota considered himself fortunate to retain the Chase lead after respective finishes of 18th and ninth in the first two events of the postseason.
“(At Darlington, in the Chase opener), we had good performance,” Hamlin said. “We were really good, and just circumstances. But this week (at WWT Raceway), we weren’t very good.
“Tough day on pit road at the end, or generally. We were able to come out of it with something, and the competition also helped.”
Indeed. Christopher Bell, 18 points behind Hamlin in third place, had a chance to grab the series lead at Gateway before being collected in a four-car accident on Lap 223 and finishing 19th.
Bell is the defending winner of the Night Race, with seven top-10 finishes in his 10 starts at the track.
Ryan Blaney, fourth in the Chase standings and 33 points in arrears, was a victim of brake rotor failure at WWT Raceway. The driver of the No. 12 Team Penske Ford finished second to Ty Gibbs in the April race at Bristol.
“We’ve still got a long way to go in this thing,” Blaney said Wednesday in a Zoom meeting with reporters. “There’s still eight (races) left. It stinks to give points away, but we’re still not out of it by any means.
“So, we’ve just got to go into (Bristol), head held high like we normally do, and go try to run well and make up what we lost.”
Despite Hamlin’s ninth-place result at Gateway, only three Chase drivers gained points on the series leader, with Larson chopping the largest number (40 points) off Hamlin’s advantage. Eleven drivers, however, lost ground to the top seed.
Larson is the only driver to gain points on Hamlin in both Chase races.
Joey Logano finished third from the pole last Sunday and trimmed his deficit to Hamlin to 51 points. Logano has two Bristol victories, but none since 2015. In last year’s Night Race, he broke a streak of five straight Bristol finishes outside the top 20 with a fifth-place run. The three-time series champion was seventh in this year’s spring race.
— NASCAR News Wire —