Kyle Larson Has One ‘Silver Lining’ Amid Looming NASCAR Nightmare Repeat at ROVAL

Last year, Kyle Larson exited the NASCAR playoffs at ROVAL after a costly mistake during the race. A year from that, Larson is once again staring into the face of another potential playoff exit at the same track. However, this time around, he didn’t have to get to the race for things to get bad for him.

On Saturday, Larson, who is currently 7th in the playoffs standings, slammed his #5 Chevy into the wall. This meant that he would not only be forced to use the backup car for the race, but he would also be starting from the back.

Yet, it’s not all that dark for Larson’s hopes for advancing to the next round, as he explained after his incident.

Kyle Larson on the silver lining heading into ROVAL

During a media interaction, Larson described what went wrong for him before he hit the wall. The HMS driver claimed he got loose entering Turn 8 and ended up overcorrecting before getting his right front into the wall.

After that, Larson opened up on how he could salvage the maximum out of his day on Sunday given the circumstances.

“I don’t think you can score stage points from 40th,” he said. “So I mean, the silver lining is maybe that you can short the stages and get your track position that way to be up front at the end of the race. Because when you go for stage points, you’re restarting like 26th or worse, every time.”

Kyle Larson on his crash in practice at the ROVAL and what now to make the most of it on Sunday pic.twitter.com/wMsr7E8Ocu

— Matt Weaver (@MattWeaverRA) October 7, 2023

NASCAR undoing their own decision might help Larson

Sure, Larson hoping to win the race or do just about enough to make it to the next round seems like a pretty tough task. But it would’ve been even tougher had NASCAR not retracted on their own decision from earlier this year.

That decision was to remove the stage cautions on road courses, because of which the races at INDY and Watkins Glen were pretty devoid of action. NASCAR announced a few weeks ago that they will be bringing back the stage cautions.

So if the race at ROVAL didn’t have any stage cautions, who knows how much ground would Larson have been able to make up?

Having said that, the task for Kyle Larson is still pretty difficult, stage cautions or not.