INDIANAPOLIS – What do you do when the entire world believes you are a racist? When your career has collapsed because you uttered the N-word while playing what is essentially a video game?
Kyle Larson packed his things and left the NASCAR hub of North Carolina for his native California, too embarrassed to show his face in public.
The facts were plain, and he doesn’t deny them: He was competing in an iRacing event late on the night of Sunday, April 12, couldn’t hear his spotter on his headset and used the N-word to get his colleague’s attention. The event was being streamed live, and Larson’s downfall was swift: The 28-year-old lost his sponsors, his job with Chip Ganassi Racing and any shot at a multimillion-dollar contract despite being due for free agency.
Depressed and devastated, Larson began a journey to understand both why he had said the word and how to grow from the experience. What the former Cup Series driver discovered was that he’d been living in a bubble most of his life in which winning races was the only thing that mattered. Anything that happened in the real world was simply not on his radar.
“I was just ignorant. And immature. I didn’t understand the negativity and hurt that comes with that word,” Larson told The Associated Press. “That’s not a word that I had ever used. I grew up in Northern California, all I ever did was race and that’s all I was focused on. There’s probably a lot of real-life experiences I didn’t get to have, and I was just ignorant to how hurtful that word is.”