Kyle Larson steadied his status as one of the greatest motorsports heroes of the current age when he won the 2025 Cup Series championship. What he delivered to his carmaker, Chevrolet, was its 34th Driver Championship. With this, his contributions to the bowtie brigade have reached a new height and mark a good time to remember how he’d almost formed his career with Toyota instead.
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Back in 2011, Larson had been driving for the midget program of Keith Kunz Motorsports, backed by Toyota. He narrated the sequence of events in a 2021 interview, “I remember them taking me to the Chicagoland Speedway and meeting with a bunch of different teams and stuff. All those teams needed money, obviously, and I was a nobody at that point.”
Unfortunately, Toyota hadn’t been willing to have a driver development program for NASCAR at that point, and Larson couldn’t climb the ladder with them. And so when the chance to sign for Chip Ganassi Racing came by, he grabbed it and packed his bags to move to the Chevrolet camp. This put Toyota into a strong reality check, and they soon began working on a driver development program.
It was following this that Joe Gibbs Racing’s Christopher Bell advanced his career through the program and is now one of Toyota’s strongest drivers in the Cup Series. Larson went on to thank Chevrolet for the strong support that it has provided to him since and noted that Toyota has certainly benefited from the lesson that they learnt by not being able to support his transition to the Cup Series.
Why does Bell race Larson differently from others
Both Larson and Bell came from similar backgrounds in dirt racing. So, they know what kind of skills each of them possesses. This makes Bell wary of racing Larson and his likes on pavements. He admitted to this in an interview with Frontstretch and stated that he employs different tactics to handle such drivers.
He said, “I think it’s just their tendencies. In the series, you get to learn about other drivers’ tendencies and what they do. And you know that if you have [Kyle] Larson lining up behind you, you don’t want to give him the top. If you have Kevin Harvick lining up behind you, you don’t want to give him the bottom.”
Dirt racing drivers have a habit of moving around different lanes when racing. Drivers who have grown up on pavements, on the other hand, stick to a single lane. The awareness that Bell has of this is a key advantage. Larson and Bell are examples of two similar drivers who went down different paths.
Their success today shows that the capable can make it in the highest levels of the sport regardless of the route they have to take.
