No sweat: Kyle Larson dominates Kansas as he pivots to Indy 500 ride

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — It would be easy to declare Kyle Larson as one of racing’s greatest talents and that is why he will roll into Indianapolis Motor Speedway as the NASCAR Cup Series points leader looking to compete in the Indianapolis 500 (Sunday, May 25, noon ET on FOX).

He’ll even race a sprint car Monday night in Kokomo, Ind., before going 230 miles an hour Tuesday in preparation for the sport’s biggest race.

But it’s not just talent that has allowed Larson to achieve such heights.

In the last 18 days, Larson has wrecked his Indy 500 car, won sprint-car races, nearly had another sprint car land in his lap, won an Xfinity Series race, and finished second and fourth in Cup races before dominating the Cup field Sunday at Kansas Speedway for his third Cup win of the season.

He even had a race where he didn’t compete. Larson had committed to the truck race Saturday at Kansas to fill in for the injured Connor Zilisch, but William Byron asked to do it and that was just fine for Larson.

Some drivers would have lingering concerns after an accident or be angry that they had a race taken away from them or have the fact they saw an opportunity of other wins slip away. Not Larson.

“Maybe I’ve hit stuff enough, I have a short memory,” Larson quipped. “My memory has faded.”

Larson led 221 of the 267 laps Sunday at Kansas, adjusting during the race how much he punished the car to make sure he didn’t have any tire issues that plagued some of the other competitors. 

He also took over the points lead from his Hendrick teammate Byron.

“Nothing really gets under his skin,” said Hendrick Motorsports Vice President of Competition Chad Knaus. “He doesn’t get wound up. He doesn’t get emotional about maybe something that happens on the racetrack.

“He doesn’t get emotional and carry weight on his shoulders. Maybe they have a bad race or whatever it may be, he’s like water off a duck’s back. He just rolls with it, and he goes and he continues to drive. And he loves racing.”

That ability to forget the past included the wreck Friday night at Lakeside Speedway, a stone’s throw from the Cup track. Competing in a series he co-owns with his brother-in-law, Larson saw another car go airborne in front of him and hit Larson’s car.

Larson shrugged it off as “just racing.”

“They got together, and I was already committed to the top and kind of had nowhere to go,” Larson said. “Thankfully, everything held up right, and nothing got in the cockpit or anything like that.”

The drivers who compete against him weekly certainly weren’t surprised that Larson could have such a mild reaction and not sweat it while dominating a Cup race.

“I don’t think there’s any way around saying that Kyle Larson’s a little bit different than the rest of us, right?” said Larson’s Hendrick teammate Alex Bowman, who has stopped sprint-car racing after suffering a broken back in an accident a couple of years ago. “Just on the versatility side, there are certainly days you can go toe to toe with him in a Cup car, but he can do it in anything.

“I would assume he’ll have a shot to run really well at the Indy 500, which is really cool.”

Chase Briscoe, another driver with sprint-car roots, said racing a sprint car with much higher horsepower and less weight allows things in a Cup car to feel like it is going in slow motion. 

“We’re all like that to a certain extent,” Briscoe said about a racer’s easy-to-forget mentality after his fourth-place finish. “Kyle’s an incredible race-car driver. I always say he’s the greatest of all time.

“Me and my dad talk about it a lot where Kyle goes and runs a sprint-car race, it could be $5,000 to win, or $100, it doesn’t matter. He’s willing to risk it all, and he doesn’t even think about it.”

That attitude allowed Larson, when he joined Hendrick Motorsports in 2021, to convince team executives to relax their restrictions on what drivers can do outside NASCAR.

“He loves driving race cars and he loves competing, and that’s something that’s pretty special,” Knaus said. “And when you have a young man that talented that wants to drive all the time, you need to let him do that.”

Having competed in a race car the last three days, Larson will be on a racetrack for 11 consecutive days as long as weather doesn’t wash out anything this week in Indiana. Of course, it was weather that ruined his attempt at an Indy 500-Coke 600 double last year — about the only time where Larson seemed visibly upset that things didn’t go his way.

“Because I race a lot, I’m guessing, … is a big part of me being able to move on quickly from things, whether it’s a good race or a bad race or a wreck or good result, bad result, whatever, mistakes on track,” Larson said.

“Obviously, though, if it happens multiple times in a row, it can kind of linger a little bit longer, but more so just hurt your confidence a little bit. I think I just race a lot, so it probably helps.”

For the second consecutive year, Larson enters the Indianapolis 500 as the Cup Series points leader. Larson isn’t known to boast, but he does see significance in that fact.

“It’s really cool,” Larson said. “I think it’s good for our team. I think it’s good for our sport. I think it’s good for racing that the Cup Series point leader is competing in the Indy 500 for the second year in a row.

“I would say last year was a goal of mine. This year I didn’t really think about it. But I do think it puts even more of a spotlight on us and our sport. … I look forward to the next couple of weeks and then actually getting to race the 600 — and hopefully having the points lead after that one, too.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and IndyCar for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.

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