Just by looking at the first four races of the 10-race NASCAR Cup playoff standings so far, it would appear that Kyle Larson is having a strong postseason.
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The Hendrick Motorsports driver enters Sunday’s fifth playoff race at Kansas Speedway ranked third among the 12 remaining contenders. On the surface, that looks impressive.
But when you dig deeper into the stats, Larson has struggled through most of the first four playoff races. He finished 19th in the playoff opener at Darlington, improved to 12th at Gateway, struggled at Bristol with a 32nd-place finish, and then bounced back with a seventh-place finish to start the Round of 12 last Sunday at New Hampshire.
During his media availability Saturday at Kansas, Larson shared his thoughts about his performance in the playoffs, and he’s not going to gloss over things.
“You can’t really hide from it: it’s probably been our weakest playoffs of my career, at least at Hendrick Motorsports,” said Larson, who joined HMS in 2021, the same season that he went on to win his first and only Cup championship. “Going through the first round with zero top 10s was not something that we expected.
“But we still gained good points throughout the first two races of that round, which was good. We just didn’t get the race finishes that we’ve had in the past. But then we had a good New Hampshire, where I know that track hasn’t been in the playoffs for a little while, but we ran better there than we have in the past.”
Now comes Kansas and the Charlotte Roval to round out the Round of 12. Unless he suffers two more devastating finishes at those tracks like he did at Bristol, Larson will likely advance to the Round of 8.
However, to borrow an old NASCAR saying, the playoffs get harder with each round.
Ironically, Larson was exceptional during the first 12 races of the season, earning all three of his wins to date, four other top-five finishes, and two additional top-10 finishes.
“I would say the beginning of the season until the end of May was really good,” Larson said. “You kind of know what you’re going to get for results and stuff each week you go to the track because we were just that strong. The schedule lined up really well for our organization; a lot of mile-and-a-halves and tracks that we were historically good at.”
Larson Has Struggled in the Last 18 Races
In the 18 races since his most recent win, the 12th race of the season and the first of this season’s two races at Kansas, the driver of the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro SS has failed to win again and has recorded just three additional top-five finishes and five other top-10 showings.
“The tracks that we haven’t been ‘lights out’ at, we were probably just a little bit worse than we have been in years prior,” Larson said. “So that just challenges you and your team mentally and emotionally sometimes.”
“We’ve dealt with a lot as a team this year. I don’t know what other teams have dealt with, but I don’t know if there’s a team that’s dealt with more than we have with losing a team member (the sudden death of his PR person, Jon Edwards), pit crew swaps, and different personnel changes. There’s just a lot that we’ve had to overcome, but I feel like we’ve worked really hard, and although the results may not show it all the time, I feel like we are building and better than we were, say in June, for sure.”
If there was ever a track for Larson to get back into the groove, it’s the 1.5-mile oval at Kansas. He’s won two of the last three Cup races there, three of the last eight, and also has two runner-up finishes and one fourth-place showing in that same stretch.
“We still have a lot of racing left to get back to what we’ve been,” Larson said. “I feel like we are getting better and better each week. Although it may be a little improvement, it’s still stacking, and hopefully it kind of peaks at the right time.”
