Kyle Larson didn’t win the battle on Sunday night at Las Vegas Motor Speedway but Kyle Larson and Cliff Daniels took a tremendous step towards winning the war with how they rallied in the South Point Casino 400.
Despite an awful first half, in which they scored only a single stage point, they nearly won the race and still extended their points lead to 40 at the halfway mark of the Chase for the Championship.
Kyle Larson
Denny Hamlin -40
Christopher Bell -55
Joey Logano -71
Ryan Blaney -80
Chase Briscoe -84
It’s becoming a recurring theme over the past month-plus but these are shades of Jimmie Johnson, Chad Knaus and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 championship buzzsaw of yore.
Meanwhile, everyone else had their opportunities to close the gap, and they all suffered setbacks when given an opening
- D enny Hamlin spun running fourth at the end of the first stage and severely damaged his splitter en route to a 16th place finish
- Christopher Bell ran up front in the first half but lost power steering in the third stage and finished 23rd
- Ty Gibbs sped on pit road and ultimately finished 17th
- Ryan Blaney finished fifth but after two mulligans, needs a win
- Joey Logano could only muster a 10th
And that’s just the macro, but the micro wasn’t that flattering to Hamlin and the 11 team in the moment things went wrong either, as they made two brutal errors in that first stage.
Had Hamlin stayed out during the caution, it traps Larson a lap down. Larson pitted so Daniels could make a 26-second adjustment, losing a lap in the process. Had Hamlin stayed out, he is more conservative falling backwards than aggressive trying to score max points.
All told, even with Larson finishing second, Hamlin gave up at least 15 points, that could have kept things largely even.
“Just trying to make up the track position that we lost and trying to push to get it back and evidently it was marbles or something up there,” Hamlin said. “It was quite odd, but I went up there to try to get a run and just spun out and obviously damaged the car.”
Meanwhile, Larson was let back onto the lead lap and finished 10th in the second break to score a single stage point. They made their car incrementally better and just did the sort of thing that looked like their predecessors in the old No. 48.
“I mean, honestly, I always thought that a win was possible because my team just gives me a lot of confidence that we're going to figure it out,” Larson said. “So it was more just of when I came out a lap down, I was like, ‘oh man, all right, we got to figure out how we can get back to the lead lap here.’
“And that all worked out quickly. And then the next run on cycled tires on the wave, I was able to move my way forward on older tires. I was like, ‘okay, my car is not as bad as I think it is now.’
“So yeah, let's just make the most out of it. Which in the back of my mind, I still thought if things go right, we could do what we did or better. So yeah, it's just, like I said, Cliff gives me a lot of confidence that when things aren't going well in the beginning, we can figure it out.”
What exactly went wrong?
“Yeah, so we were just really loose to start with so how do you make that decision to make a big change,” Daniels said. “And obviously, that's what we elected to do under green versus trying to ride it out to the stage.
“My thoughts on that are seeing how far off our pace was and how loose the car was, I'm not confident that if we would have just avoided doing that adjustment and try to do some smaller stuff that we would have made it to the stage on the lead lap anyways.
“So I wanted to go ahead and try to get an adjustment in the car that I knew was going to get it closer and eat the pain early at risk of obviously what it was and give us that much more opportunity to fight back from there versus delaying that and having a big hole to dig out of at the stage. Again, not proud of the fact that we started off, but proud of what the team did to get it back closer and Kyle put up a heck of a fight.”
It was a championship level fight and they have a 2.0 average finish through five races.
“I think we probably overachieved there at the end with how our day started,” Daniels said. “So yeah, I mean the finishes have been great, but honestly it's a testament to the hard work from all the guys on the 5 team, everybody back at Hendrick Motorsports. It's not been an easy season. It's not been a great season for a lot of reasons, but we've continued to stay in the fight and it's going to take that moving forward.”
All everyone else can hope for is that the law of averages manifests itself and that a 2.0 average finish is not sustainable for another five races.
“Just got to play the ball from where it lies and where it lies is we got a little gap we got to make up, so we got to perform at our best,” said Hamlin.
