This year, there has been a brewing concern in some circles of NASCAR about a few drivers having an unfair advantage over the others in the Cup Series. Take, for instance, Kyle Larson. The Hendrick Motorsports driver is without a doubt one of the most talented and accomplished drivers of his generation. But is his success this year in races on Sunday on certain tracks (which he ended up winning on) because of his ‘practice’ on those surfaces on Friday or Saturday?
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A question along these lines was asked to Denny Hamlin during an episode of his podcast show after the All-Star weekend on which Larson not only won the Truck race but ended up winning the big race on Sunday too.
Denny Hamlin unsure about the “unfair advantage” Kyle Larson could be getting
During a ‘Dear Denny’ segment of his podcast show, Hamlin was asked whether NASCAR should ban Cup drivers from taking part in the lower series races whenever there’s a new track on the schedule. “My first answer would be no, because I think it would be a good buildup. But the competitor in me says yes because it probably is an unfair advantage, not unfair if you go get a ride, but it’s not everyone can go get a ride,” the Joe Gibbs Racing driver replied.
“You’re Hendrick cars, you can just go get a truck or go get a car and field it because you think it can make your team better. But not everyone has those resources to be able to just, ‘Oh, you want to run trucks this weekend? No problem, I’ll make that happen.'”
Hamlin claimed that this rule may never change, but a driver who runs Xfinity will probably end up topping the charts when it comes to Cup practice. The senior driver pointed out the reason for that is because of little things on racetracks which end up paying off big dividends.
“Like at North Wilkesboro, there’s little patches that, until I ran and got a bunch of reps at the racetrack, I didn’t know that it was way faster if you do it this way. And I’m sure after a bazillion laps of running, Kyle Larson knew every in and out. Like it proved out because he was the first one to run the apron in turns 3 and 4, coming off of turn 4, he was the first one in the Cup race to drive all the way down to the concrete. Us, we were thinking, ‘Man, I don’t know, our cars, it’s got diffusers so I don’t know, put a big air gap under there, does it make it worse?’ He knew right away, ‘Well, I’m gonna do that. Because I’ve got repetitions doing it,'” Hamlin explained.
“So I think that it is an advantage. Is it really unfair? No, probably not. But yeah, I would say that it’d be cool if we all stayed in the Cup series. Again, that’s not what sells tickets, and that matters.”
Tony Stewart on Kyle Larson’s “raw talent”
In an interview from 2019, a couple of years before Larson’s NASCAR achievements matched his talent, Tony Stewart termed the man from Elk Grove as one of the finest drivers he has ever seen.
“You look at what Kyle does in a car — he overdrives everything he does, but he can still will make it work. I mean, there’s times he’s got that thing sideways and saves it, and it’s like, there’s not a lot of guys that could save it and push it that hard for that long and not make that mistake,” he said of Larson as per USA Today. “There’s just not a lot of guys that can do that.”
Stewart argued that while every racecar driver has some amount of “raw talent”, there’s only a handful of drivers who are “truly pure, raw talented drivers,” a small group of which Larson is a big part.
