If Sunday at Phoenix Raceway had a moral, it was this: sometimes the quiet kid in the corner isn’t quiet at all. Sometimes he’s just biding his time until the last two laps, then suddenly he’s knocking over everyone else’s lemonade stand while looking like he meant to do it all along. That kid was Kyle Larson.
For most of the afternoon, Larson’s Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 Chevrolet looked like a car that had been mistaken for a race car rental. Stage 1? Out of the top ten. Stage 2? Ninth. Watching him shuffle along, you might have assumed he had turned up to Phoenix for the snacks and air conditioning rather than to contend for the Cup Series win.
Then came the final stage, and the Hendrick Chevy suddenly went from timid house cat to alley-cat mercenary. In the chaos of the last 30 laps—a period featuring cars flying, spinning, and occasionally attempting human flight lessons—Larson prowled the track, jabbing, nudging, and generally reminding everyone that a Hendrick Chevy in the hands of Kyle Larson is rarely polite. By the checkered flag, he had carved out third place, a podium that felt like winning a battle you weren’t even sure you were signed up for.
“It was an awesome finish for how much we struggled today,” Larson admitted afterward, sounding like a man who’d just survived a stampede of caffeinated elephants. “All day, I felt like we might not even be a top-15 car. This No. 5 HendrickCars.com Chevrolet team just kept fighting. We gained some track position and made our Chevy better throughout the race. We had some good restarts. It just worked out for us there in the final stage. Just proud of this No. 5 team.”
Translation: the car was mediocre, the rest of the field was murderous, and somehow Larson and his crew turned a dumpster fire into a respectable fireworks show.
But don’t let that podium fool you—he knows there’s work to do. “We just need to be a lot better. Aside from strategy and pit road, we never really have a shot here at Phoenix Raceway,” he said. In other words: the No. 5 team isn’t dominant yet, and Phoenix is still a racetrack that will chew you up and spit you out if you blink.
What made the afternoon especially remarkable was that Larson didn’t have to just race. He had to survive a gladiator pit lane, dodge airborne cars, and somehow stay polite enough not to start flipping people off while hurtling at 140 mph. A good restart here, a little opportunism there, and suddenly he was a contender again.
“We’ll just keep working hard on hitting the set-up to feel like we can be a contender here from start to finish,” Larson said. In other words, they’re learning. They’re improving. And if they keep this up, the next time Phoenix serves up chaos, Larson won’t just survive—it might be the rest of the field that comes out looking like amateurs at a demolition derby.
In the end, Larson’s Phoenix afternoon was a reminder that races aren’t measured by the first 299 laps—they’re measured by the last 10, when chaos reigns and only the cunning, the daring, and the slightly insane prevail. And for Kyle Larson, Sunday night proved he has all three in abundance.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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