By now, every voice must admit that Kyle Larson is one of the strongest drivers at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He won for the third time at LVMS on Sunday and thus bagged his 24th Cup career victory. Besides that, the Elk Grove native kept the winning streak of his Chevy team alive and brought Hendrick Motorsports its second victory in the first three races of the current season. However, to do that, he had to pull off every trick of the trade and beat an extremely competitive Tyler Reddick, who battled him till the last lap for the win.
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Larson’s margin of victory over Reddick was merely 0.441 seconds. With just two laps to go, Reddick was riding on the top groove, expecting Larson to take the middle or the top. But to his utter surprise, the #5 driver veered down to the bottom. “I knew I was going to have to kind of catch him off guard with a late kind of block,” said Larson during the post-race media availability.
“I thought I had a decent gap with 8-ish laps left. I was like okay, I need to get going up top in 3 and 4 to try and build some momentum. That was a wrong move. It allowed him to get much closer to me and then I was like, crap, now I gotta block him,” he added. This way, Larson could aero-block Reddick’s Toyota and kill his run down the front stretch.
After having led 181 of the 267 laps, Larson’s win made him the points leader with a cushion of eight points over the reigning Cup champion Ryan Blaney.
Reddick was frustrated with his runner-up finish
Reddick’s frustration knew no bounds after Larson blocked him and took away practically every option that he had to clear him. He admitted that he hated running second just because of how close it was to being the winner. Nevertheless, he applauded Larson’s driving prowess over the concluding laps.
“Kyle did a really good job there taking away pretty much every option I had there to close the gap,” he admitted. “Second sucks, that is for sure. You have to run up front all day long, and when asked about what we need to do to get better, that’s the very thing, and we didn’t do it. We were pretty evenly matched, so I don’t know if there was anything that I really could’ve done to get around him.”
Reddick revealed that he was waiting for Larson to make a mistake somewhere or have some traffic knock his wind around. But unfortunately for Reddick, Larson did not make any mistakes. Despite making a solid run for the win, disappointment resonated in the 23XI Racing driver’s voice as he said, “I don’t like running second.”
