Kyle Larson says he "made way too many mistakes" to successfully defend his NASCAR Cup title after being eliminated from the 2022 championship playoffs prior to the semi-final round.
Larson won his first Cup title last year in his first season driving for Hendrick Motorsports and won a series-high 10 races, but has only won twice and led 368 laps - compared to the 2,581 of 2021 - following the switch to the Next Gen car for 2022.
He still appeared to be in good position to advance on points to the semi-final round of the playoffs during most of Sunday’s race at the Charlotte Roval, but lost five laps after breaking his toe link and having to pit under green for repairs.
This put Larson in danger of dropping out of the top eight that would transfer, and Chase Briscoe's rise to ninth after late cautions that shuffled the order meant the Stewart-Haas Ford driver claimed the final transfer spot by two points over Larson.
“You give up that many spots, you know you're going to be close, then the caution there [sealed my fate],” Larson said.
“I just made way too many mistakes all year long. Made another one today [which] ultimately cost us an opportunity to go chase another championship.
“Just extremely mad at myself. Let the team down a number of times this year, and let them down in a big way today.
“We’ll keep fighting. We’ll come back stronger. I’ll definitely come back stronger and smarter, make better moves out there.”
After shouldering much of the blame for his performance this season, Larson was asked how he could make it up to his team in what is left of the 2022 season.
“Go race hard,” he said. “There's definitely no other person to blame but myself for today.
“I feel like our team put ourselves in position as well as we could on points. Got as many stage points as we could. I think it was plus 27 or 28 at the time when I screwed up. Just for no reason, either.
“I wasn’t even pushing that hard at that moment. Got loose, caught me off guard.
“Yeah, just got to keep working on my craft, just be better, make a lot less mistakes.”
Briscoe confident of strong form
Reflecting on his “wild day”, Briscoe said he had never stopped believing he could make the cut for the final eight along with winner Christopher Bell, Chase Elliott, Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin, William Byron and Ross Chastain.
“I told my guys before we took the initial green in the race, there’s a difference between thinking we could move on and knowing we could move on,” Briscoe said.
“This team never gives up. I told them I was never going to give up.
“It took every bit of it there at the end. To be easily in (early in the race), then that debris caution comes out.
“Still, I thought we had a really good shot of making it in. Get wrecked on the backstretch. Crazy at the end of these races, especially the road course race, how much can change so quickly.”
Briscoe won earlier this season at Phoenix which is site of the championship race and said there are “a lot of really, really good race tracks for me,” coming up in the playoff round of eight.
“If we can get to Phoenix, we know we got a good car there, too,” he added.
