SONOMA, Calif. — The Indianapolis 500 is over, and the worried wait to see if Kyle Larson’s participation in that event would cost him a shot at winning a NASCAR championship has been resolved.
So it’s back to life as usual for NASCAR’s busiest driver. That means a lot more races and, not surprisingly, more winning.
Days after NASCAR officially cleared his participation in this year’s playoffs, Larson earned his third Cup Series victory of the season, and this one came at his home track.
The victory Sunday for Larson, who grew up 80 miles away from Sonoma Raceway in Elk Grove, was his second on the rolling road course in picturesque wine country. It is the fifth career win on a road course on NASCAR’s top circuit for the 2021 Cup Series champion and moved him to the top of the current points standings.
It was a welcome reward after a grueling month of May in which Larson became the fifth driver to attempt to run the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 on the same day. Rain at both events on May 26 made his attempt at “The Double” a bust and put him in danger of not being granted a waiver to remain eligible for the Cup Series playoffs later this year.
It took until last Tuesday for NASCAR to grant Larson the waiver. After that the 31-year-old Hendrick Motorsports driver took his first two consecutive days off in months to lay by the pool in the California sun, do some wine tasting in familiar territory, and then win at Sonoma.
“My life is so hectic that I never feel like I get a normal week for myself,” Larson said. “… It was really nice for me to get to come here this week and just get to do nothing for one day, and then go be a normal tourist on Thursday. It’s just a very relaxing week.”
It ends this Tuesday, when Larson competes in the $55,555-to-win Bikini Zone Eagle Nationals in Nebraska. He’ll move on after that to Iowa Speedway, the next stop for NASCAR, and if he can pull it off, he’d like to run a sprint car at nearby Knoxville on Friday and Saturday.
That’s the kind of schedule Larson prefers and tried to pull off last month. The start of the Indy 500 was delayed four hours by rain, though, which forced him to miss the start of NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. By the time he arrived in North Carolina, the Cup Series race had been stopped for rain, never resumed, and Larson never turned a lap.
Because of that, it took NASCAR a week of internal debate to decide if one of its biggest stars would be given the pass required to remain eligible for playoff participation. Larson said he never stressed about the looming decision.
“Are we still talking about waivers?” he asked after Sunday’s race. “Literally, my mind never wavered. It was always focused on executing and winning the regular-season points title.”
Jeff Gordon, the NASCAR Hall of Fame driver who now serves as vice chairman at Hendrick, said Larson and his crew were never rattled during the wait for a waiver.
“I didn’t see it affecting the majority of the team,” said Gordon, who added Larson and crew chief Cliff Daniels allowed the Hendrick executives to handle communication with NASCAR. “As far as how it trickled down the team, I didn’t see where they were really (bothered). They seem to be business as usual. I think the best medicine in any of those situations is getting back to the race track.
“Especially when they got here, home track for Kyle, a track they enjoy racing at, I think that put a lot of that to rest.”
AP photo by Godofredo A. Vásquez / NASCAR drivers compete in Sunday’s Cup Series event at Sonoma Raceway in Northern California.Larson now has 26 Cup Series career wins, with the last 20 of those coming since he joined Hendrick in 2021. That ranks third in the organization behind Gordon (93) and Jimmie Johnson (83), another NASCAR Hall of Famer.
Larson led 19 of the 110 laps at Sonoma in his No. 5 Chevrolet, passing Martin Truex Jr.’s No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota with eight laps left to go ahead for good. Truex, who won last year’s race, ran out of gas before he finished this time and was scored 27th as a pair of tow trucks followed him to the line.
Michael McDowell wound up second for Front Row Motorsports, fellow Ford driver Chris Buescher of RFK Racing was third, and Hendrick’s Chase Elliott was fourth. He was followed by another Chevy driver, Trackhouse Racing’s Ross Chastain, who had last-lap contact with Kyle Busch that dropped the Richard Childress Racing driver from fifth to 12th.
Tyler Reddick of 23XI Racing’s eighth-place finish was the best result for a Toyota driver.
Denny Hamlin, the season points leader at the start of the race, had his day come to an abrupt end after just two laps when his JGR Toyota’s engine failed, sending him to a last-place finish at Sonoma for the second consecutive year.
Hamlin said he had zero warning the engine was about to blow. He started 25th and was 29th when the trouble popped up.
“No. Nothing. It’s just the gearing is a little weird for the track,” Hamlin said. “It’s a lot of high-end RPM stuff, but the same as everyone else, and I’m just not really sure. They’ll look at it and figure it out, but certainly not ideal.”
Hamlin, who was scored with a 38th-place finish, has finished outside the top 30 at Sonoma for three consecutive years.
It wasn’t much better for teammate Ty Gibbs, who hit the wall 16 laps into the race and finished just one spot better than Hamlin.
Said Gibbs: “I just made a mistake and took us out of this day.”
The Cup Series will visit Iowa Speedway for the first time next Sunday. NASCAR began using the Newton venue in 2006 for lower-level series races and then some national series events in 2009 — but never the top-tier circuit — and then stopped using the track after the 2019 season.
IndyCar made the track an annual stop in 2007 and has been there every year since except 2021, with the open-wheel series holding a doubleheader weekend with one race each on Saturday and Sunday.