Joey Logano’s title run last year set a bar for all the fans to question the championship format. And then on top of that, Kyle Larson’s charge to the 2025 Cup Series championship caught attention for all the wrong reasons, including the championship format awarding the title to the drivers who didn’t perform that well. The surprise had little to do with Larson’s résumé.
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The No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports driver already proved he could carry a season on his shoulders, dominating the 2021 campaign en route to his first championship and leading sizable chunks of the year that followed. What raised eyebrows this time was the swoon that gripped his season after mid-summer, a slide that became difficult to ignore once his second double-duty attempt unraveled in ways he never envisioned.
Many believed the weight of the Indy 500–Coca-Cola 600 crossover hung heavy on him. When neither race lived up to the billing, it sparked conversations about whether the setback dented his confidence. Recently, Larson admitted as much during a candid conversation with Brad Gillie on The RACER.
Larson said, “I mean it’s really hard for me to know for sure, but I mean, it all kind of all my racing kind of took a dip after May. So, yeah, I think just probably my confidence took a hit personally. Yeah, just cuz I didn’t feel like I performed how I could have or should have at Indy and I made a lot of mistakes throughout the couple weeks there and crashed a few times.”
He explained that those mistakes carried into the 600, a race he felt he had a real chance to win. As he put it, he unknowingly piled pressure on himself. “I thought I was pretty easygoing with it all. But then… the Sunday finishes, and you don’t do good, you really realize like how much pressure you put on yourself.”
That realization stung him, as Larson believed he let himself and others down. He now thinks the timing of the double-duty effort, coupled with the confidence hit, affected him more than he initially understood. Compounding the struggle, Hendrick Motorsports’ performance dipped during the same stretch, leaving the No. 5 group fighting uphill.
Larson described the midseason lull as a product of several issues converging at once, dropping him and his team into a mediocre rhythm that proved difficult to shake. Yet he emphasized that even while slogging through the slump, the group kept their heads down, trusted each other, and chipped away at their weaknesses. The momentum didn’t swing overnight, but progress surfaced slowly, entering the playoffs, then steadily grew round by round.
That internal resolve, Larson believes, paved the road to their title. The turnaround from a summer mired in self-doubt to hoisting a second Cup championship felt surreal even to him.
