Hendrick Motorsports driver Kyle Larson spent the past week watching videos of NASCAR’s 2021 season, when he won 10 points races on his way to the Cup Series championship, “to remind myself that I used to be good.”
He still is. Larson pulled away on a restart with 14 laps to go and easily won Sunday at Richmond Raceway.
“I just really wanted to look at old tape of myself and see where my mindset was and to see my confidence,” Larson said after his 20th career victory in NASCAR’s top series.
Larson started the final green flag run with teammate Josh Berry to his outside and beat him into the first turn. Berry, who is filling in for the injured Chase Elliott, held on to finish second, and Trackhouse Racing’s Ross Chastain made it a sweep of the top three spots for Chevrolet.
Christopher Bell was fourth in a Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, and Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick was fifth in the highest finish for a Ford driver.
It’s the third victory of the season for the four-car Hendrick team and came just four days after a NASCAR appeals panel overturned a 100-point penalty against Larson and fellow full-time drivers Alex Bowman and William Byron for an illegal part. It also came with fill-in crew chief Kevin Meendering leading Larson’s team, because the appeals panel upheld the four-race suspensions of all four team’s crew chiefs.
“I was just happy to fill a gap and help those guys out in a tough situation,” Meendering said. “This is a testament to all the hard work by those guys on that team and to Hendrick Motorsports.”
Chevy drivers have won five of the seven races so far this season.
All the Hendrick cars except for Berry ran in contention throughout Sunday’s race, with Byron, the Cup Series’ only two-time winner this season, leading a race-high 117 laps and running fourth for a restart with 21 laps to go. The field bunched up heading into the first turn on the 3/4-mile track, and Bell hit his left rear-quarter panel, sending Byron spinning into the wall. He finished 24th.
“It looked like the 1 (Chastain) was inside the 20 (Bell), and the 20 overcooked the corner, had the fronts locked up and nailed us in the left rear,” Byron said. “It is what it is. I had a great race car.”
Bell said he was trying to keep Chastain at bay: “I tried to protect from him going to the inside, and he still made it three wide there at the last minute, and there wasn’t enough room.”
The Cup Series never got on the track Saturday because of rain, leading NASCAR to give them an extra set of tires, and even then, teams pitted for lightly used scuffs for the final green flag run. That paid off big for Berry and Michael McDowell, who stayed on the track during the previous green flag stop, then got the caution that made it pay off.
“Everybody on the team made some great calls,” Berry said. “I’m so glad they tried something different there at the end to just get us up front.”
McDowell turned it into a sixth-place finish. Todd Gilliland, the third driver who stayed on the track, finished 15th.
“Our car was really good on the long run,” McDowell said, “and I think we were going to be 15th or 16th, so you might as well go for it and see if you can’t come up with something good, and it worked out.”
A three-week run of short tracks for the Cup Series makes it second stop with next Sunday night’s dirt race at Tennessee’s Bristol Motor Speedway.
Newgarden wins
FORT WORTH, Texas — Josef Newgarden and Pato O’Ward swapped the lead over and over, each driver refusing to give an inch at Texas Motor Speedway.
With two laps to go to reach victory lane, they even touched wheels.
“We’re going wheel to wheel like 226 miles an hour or something,” O’Ward said. “It’s pretty insane, I have to say.”
Their thrilling duel in Sunday’s IndyCar race came to an abrupt end when Romain Grosjean crashed with one lap remaining, moments after Newgarden had surged ahead of O’Ward. Newgarden crossed the finish line under caution to win at Texas for the second straight season and the third time in his career.
“I don’t know what else to say other than our car was fast,” Nashville native Newgarden said while wearing the traditional celebratory cowboy hat presented to the winner at Texas. “I don’t know if it fits right. I apologize to any cowboys that would make fun of my fit.”
Team Penske’s Newgarden and Arrow McLaren’s O’Ward were so dominant — their Chevy engine-driven rides combined to lead 214 of the 250 laps on the 1.5-mile oval — that at one point in the race, they were the only two drivers on the lead lap. They frantically swapped first place over the final third of the race, and neither showed any inclination to lift off the gas in the fight for the win.
There were periods of white-knuckle pack racing, three-wide passes and jaw-dropping bravery as drivers seemed unafraid of the high speeds in the first oval race of the season. A day earlier, IndyCar used the entire field to specifically run a second high line around the track in an effort to create a passing lane.
The result was 482 passes for position, nearly 200 more than in last year’s race. The 26 lead changes were the most at Texas since 2001, a span of 26 IndyCar races.
The chance for one final thrilling lap ended when Grosjean crashed while running fifth as the leaders took the white flag. Newgarden led a race-high 123 of the 250 laps, bouncing back last month’s season opener, when his engine caught on fire on the downtown streets of St. Petersburg, Florida.
“We are playing a little bit of catch-up. Got a long way to go,” Newgarden said. “We are on the board. We were not on the board leaving St. Pete.”
O’Ward, who led 91 laps at Texas, is IndyCar’s new points leader, having also finished second in the opener.
“It’s been a hell of a start to the year,” he said.
Alex Palou finished third for Chip Ganassi Racing and was followed by David Malukas of Dale Coyne Racing and Ganassi’s Scott Dixon in a pack of Honda-powered drivers.
Messy victory
MELBOURNE, Australia — Two-time reigning Formula One champion Max Verstappen won the Australian Grand Prix for the first time, doing so in remarkable circumstances after a chaotic race filled with drama from the green light to the checkered flag.
Although Red Bull’s first triumph in Melbourne since 2011 was expected, the carnage that unfolded in the latter stages of the race at Albert Park made it an extremely hard-fought win.
Seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton, who drove superbly in his Mercedes, was second for his first podium finish of the season, and Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso took third.
Only 12 of the 20 starters finished Sunday, after a late rolling start behind a safety car, and the sport’s governing body said it was the first F1 GP in history with three red flags.
Verstappen was pleased to win but questioned the decision by stewards to issue a red flag after a crash on lap 55 of the 58-lap race instead of deploying a safety car, calling the end of the race “a bit of a mess.”
Red Bull has won the first three races of an F1 season for the first time, with Sergio Perez winning the Saudi Arabian GP on March 19 after Verstappen won the Bahrain GP on March 5 to open the schedule. The next race is the Azerbaijan GP on April 30.