A winless streak of more than 50 races is not ideal. Ending that drought at 51 races, however, and doing it in the second race of NASCAR’s Chase? That is considerably better.
Kyle Larson finally got the monkey off his back Sunday at World Wide Technology Raceway, surviving a race that seemed determined to eliminate nearly everyone before it eliminated him.
And if Larson’s drought was finally over, so was the patience of just about everyone else.
Larson won the Enjoy Illinois 300 by surviving two overtime restarts, 18 cautions, two red flags and a brake-rotor apocalypse that gobbled up Chase drivers like the track had developed a personal grudge against the playoff field.
He also had a little help from his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Alex Bowman, who put his Chevrolet between Larson and Joey Logano on the final restart and essentially served as a very expensive, very fast human shield.
The final margin was just .333 of a second.
That was about as comfortable as this race ever got.
“This is a no better time to have a great day than today,” Larson said. “Proud of it and feel like we got our swagger back a little bit.”
He certainly needed some swagger. Larson had gone 51 races without a Cup Series victory, dating back to his win at Kansas Speedway last season. For a driver of his caliber, that is roughly equivalent to a professional quarterback forgetting how to throw a football.
But Larson never seemed particularly interested in panicking.
Asked whether the drought had caused him to question himself, Larson gave a remarkably simple answer.
“Honestly, no,” he said. “It would be easy to think that. No, I haven’t. I haven’t doubted myself. I haven’t doubted our team. Maybe myself at times. Never my team.”
On Sunday, Hendrick Motorsports gave him a team worth believing in.
The key to the victory came late, when Larson pitted while Logano stayed on the track. Logano had spent much of the afternoon driving the dominant car, but fresh tires turned out to be worth rather more than bragging rights.
Larson took the lead with 12 laps remaining in regulation and then had to survive the sort of restart sequence NASCAR officials presumably invented while sitting around a table asking, “How much chaos can we possibly create?”
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Logano finished third, unable to get back around Larson. William Byron, who had been caught up in an earlier wreck, somehow clawed his way back to fourth. Ross Chastain finished fifth.
Austin Dillon was sixth, Connor Zilisch seventh, Carson Hocevar eighth, with Denny Hamlin and Austin Cindric completing the top 10.
But the finishing order barely tells the story.
There were 18 cautions, a track record, and 14 of the 16 Chase drivers were involved in incidents. Four of those playoff contenders failed to finish.
The longest green-flag run of the day was 63 laps in Stage 2, which sounds almost quaint considering the rest of the afternoon. Naturally, even that stage ended under caution.
The biggest villain was the brake rotor.
Ryan Blaney, Chase Elliott and Chase Briscoe were among the Chase drivers to fall victim. Blaney’s rotor failed on Lap 156, sending him into the frontstretch wall. Elliott’s exploded on Lap 215, sweeping Briscoe into the resulting mess.
And then there were the restarts.
They were less “racing restart” and more “everyone grab whatever piece of asphalt you can find and hope for the best.”
With 20 laps remaining, Christopher Bell and Josh Berry were fighting for fifth when Bubba Wallace attempted to squeeze into the low side.
That did not go particularly well.
Cars spun, pieces flew and Tyler Reddick arrived just in time to have his Toyota launched off the back of Berry’s Ford. It was the sort of sequence that makes you wonder whether NASCAR has quietly started awarding points for airborne vehicles.
Then, with 13 laps to go, another three-wide battle detonated outside the top 10.
This time it was Ty Gibbs’ turn to become part of the scenery. Daniel Suarez was involved again, along with Connor Zilisch, Ty Dillon, AJ Allmendinger and Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
NASCAR stopped the field to clean up the carnage.
And just when everyone thought they had seen enough, Chris Buescher suffered a brake-rotor failure with two laps remaining, bringing out another caution and the second red flag of the afternoon.
That sent the race into overtime.
The first attempt ended when Hocevar and Shane van Gisbergen tangled, sending SVG spinning. The second attempt finally stayed clean.
Larson took the checkered flag.
After over a year of waiting, the defending Cup champion was finally back in Victory Lane.
Logano, meanwhile, was left wondering what might have been.
The No. 22 Ford had been the car to beat for much of the afternoon, but fresh tires and a handful of Hendrick teammates turned that advantage into a third-place finish.
“The restart where Larson took the lead. That’s where I lost it obviously,” Logano said. “He just rolled the bottom really good and cleared me, which is really surprising.”
Then came perhaps the most honest assessment of the afternoon.
“His first, like, three laps of every run was pretty spectacular,” Logano said. “You had a bunch of three-lap runs there at the end. Once he got there, then the 48 got there, the 24 got there. Had no homies with me. No more friends. On my own.”
Logano’s only hope was that Bowman would decide friendship was more important than career advancement.
“All I could hope was that Bowman really, really, really wanted to win, was willing…” Logano said. “That was my only chance there, that last one.”
It wasn’t.
Larson got the restart he needed, Bowman got into second and Logano’s excellent Sunday became another one of those races where being the fastest car apparently comes with absolutely no guarantee that you will actually win.
“I mean, it’s a good run, right?” Logano said. “Got a lot of stage points, finished in the top five again, which is obviously what we need to do. Thinking about what the 25 points would feel like right about now, it does stink some.”
That is NASCAR’s Chase in one sentence.
You can dominate all afternoon, lead a pile of laps, score stage points and still spend Sunday night wondering how someone else walked away with your trophy.
The Chase now heads to Bristol Motor Speedway next Saturday night, where Christopher Bell is the defending winner.
And after the wreckage left behind at Gateway, the remaining playoff contenders may want to bring something more substantial than their helmets.
Perhaps a spare brake rotor.
RACE RESULTS
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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