Even after clinching his third NASCAR Cup Series championship on Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Kyle Larson is loath to reflect on his own position in the pantheon of elite drivers.
And if there are comparisons to be made to luminaries of the distant and recent past, Larson will leave that to others.
“I’ve heard comparisons my whole life and career,” Larson said Sunday night after clinching the title with a 12th-place finish the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race. “I would really give the same answer. I just have always tried to block it out, not think about it, because I want to just—I don’t know—not reflect because I want to accomplish more.
“Obviously, I’m very appreciative of any comparison that I ever get, if it’s a good comparison. But yeah, I don’t know, I’m so focused on just racing and driving and our team that I don’t spend much time kind of listening to other stuff, good or bad.”
Where Larson is reticent, others are more than willing to fill the gap. Before the title race, Mario Andretti recorded a message to Larson that expressed a kinship between two of the most versatile drivers ever to race on asphalt or dirt.
“Best of luck to him,” Andretti concluded. “I hope the wind is at his back, ‘cause I’ll be on his shoulder.”
Andretti is the only driver to win the most impressive motorsports trifecta: the Daytona 500, Indianapolis 500 and the Formula 1 driving championship.
For his part, Larson is a three-time champion of the Chili Bowl Midget Nationals and a four-time winner of the Knoxville Nationals for 410 winged sprint cars.
Hendrick Motorsports vice chairman Jeff Gordon, himself a four-time Cup Series champion, believes Larson’s third title only adds to a stature in motorsports that already has become an established fact.
“In our eyes, he’s there, right?” Gordon said. “We see what he accomplishes in everything he gets in. It’s hard to pick the most impressive thing that he does, because he gets in an IndyCar, he goes fast. Sprint car, he’ll fly overnight, get in the car, go win Knoxville, then come back and win the Brickyard…
“That’s rare air. Very rare. So few guys that are capable of doing that, or even get the opportunity to do that. Whatever stats he needs to accumulate, OK, if that’s what it takes. I think he’s already there.”
From Larson’s point of view, the 2026 season turned on a dime with a strong performance in the first Chase race at Darlington Raceway, where he finished fifth and noted, “Wow, OK, I feel like we’re the 5 team again.”
A week later, at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway, he ended a 51-race winless streak and began to take control of the Chase.
Larson’s crew chief, Cliff Daniels, pointed to an earlier event that galvanized the team—Larson’s victory on the half-mile dirt track at Knoxville and the circumstances that surrounded it.
It was an unlikely and serendipitous win. On Saturday, Aug. 15, the day of the Knoxville finals, Larson was driving the Cup car at Richmond Raceway, where he fashioned a hard-fought sixth-place finish.
Larson was resigned to missing the Nationals until a rainstorm postposed the start of the feature for more than four hours. After a police escort to the airport and a two-hour flight, Larson arrived at Knoxville in time to start the race.
“He showed up, got on the ground within 30 minutes of race time, wins that race,” Daniels said. “He came back the next couple weeks with the core belief and acknowledgement from everyone at Hendrick that we cared about him more than just on the Cup side.
“Because in a season that isn’t going very well, it could have been easy for any of us to be like, ‘Man, we’re not going to prioritize dirt racing, not a big deal.’ But it was a big deal to him, so it was a big deal to us.”
Daniels was the race engineer on Jimmie Johnson’s team when Johnson won his record-tying seventh Cup championship in 2016. Asked whether tying Johnson was part of his long-term vision, Larson demurred.
“Seven is a big number,” Larson said. “These championships are extremely hard to come by. I mean, now that we’re back to the Chase format, I think championships could be a little bit more realistic, because it’s not down to one race.
“I don’t know. Right now, I’m not thinking—definitely not thinking—about seven. I’m happy to have three. If I could get one more, I would be even happier. If you end up getting four, then the next is five.”
That statement reflects Larson’s attitude toward racing in general. He focuses on the next event to the exclusion of what might come later.
Whatever that next race is—whether on asphalt or dirt, whether in a stock car or sprint car—chances are Larson will have a chance to win it.
— NASCAR News Wire —