Stat Sheet: Kyle Larson’s Beatdown Was More Dominant Than It Looked

A driver just led more than 450 laps in a single NASCAR Cup Series race at Bristol Motor Speedway? Have we been teleported back to the 1970s?

It’s easy to think that’s the case, Saturday night’s (Sept. 21) night race featured an ass kicking of epic proportions that we haven’t seen in almost 50 years.

Kyle Larson led 462 of the 500 laps, which marks the most laps a driver has led in a single race at Bristol since 1977 and the fourth-highest total led at Bristol in Cup Series history.

Simply put, the No. 5 car was in its own zip code the entire night.

Larson first took the lead from Hendrick Motorsports teammate Alex Bowman on lap 33 and never looked back, leading all but six laps under caution during pit stops.

Nursing an approximately two-to-three-second lead most of the night, Larson turned on the jets in the final 50 laps, lapping all but nine cars and winning by 7.088 seconds — the largest margin of victory in the Next Gen car and the largest at Bristol since Dale Earnhardt won there in 1994.

Larson’s dominance last weekend was a bizarre but extremely impressive outlier in the Next Gen era, a time where it’s been more difficult than ever for one driver to completely take over an entire race.

Of the 100 Next Gen races run prior to Bristol, only one of them saw a single driver lead more than 75% of the race. That occurred at New Hampshire Motor Speedway last July, where Martin Truex Jr. led 254 of the 301 laps en route to his most recent win in Cup competition.

Meanwhile, 2021 — the final season of the Gen 6 car — saw five races where one driver led more than 75% of the race; Larson was the driver in four of them, and he won three.

Whether it’s an increase in cautions, an increase in late cautions, an increased difficulty in passing or the equalization of the Cup field in terms of lap time, team resources or driver talent, the beatdowns seen just five years ago are becoming more and more infrequent.

Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to individual judgment, but the advanced data from Bristol shows just how equal the field has become.

It also shows how untouchable Larson was that night. Sure, this data only covers average speed in the final 50 laps of the race, but the gap between Larson and second-fastest Bubba Wallace is almost larger than the gap between Wallace and 12th-fastest Christopher Bell.

To have one car that far ahead while second through 12th are separated by just fractions of a second is crazy.

Not only did Larson control the final 470 laps of the race, but he didn’t even receive a serious challenge from anyone all night. There was never a point where another driver was faster than but bogged down by clean air. When it was time to put the race away, Larson clutched up and kissed the entire field goodbye.

Meanwhile, taking the No. 5 car out of the equation shows exactly why no one else has been able to dominate a race from start-to-finish quite like Larson did in the Next Gen car.

If Larson’s car hypothetically suffered a terminal mechanical failure on the pace laps, who would’ve had the fastest car instead? It’s impossible to tell when second through 12th are running lap times right on top of each other and achieving no separation, and that’s precisely why there wasn’t as much jockeying for position from second on back throughout the night as there could have been.

Heck, Truex ran top five for the first 300 laps, sped on pit road, dropped back to 24th and stayed there the rest of the race. A top-five car was instantly turned into a jalopy by a flip of track position.

All of this goes to say just how unreal Larson’s performance was. He became the first driver in the Next Gen era to lead 300 laps in a single race, let alone 400. It had been 15 years since a driver last cracked 300 laps led at Bristol and it had been 19 years since a driver won at Bristol while leading at least 400. Meanwhile, no one in the last 47 years had led over 450, yet Larson accomplished all of that in a car that has seldom seen one driver dominate.

Had Larson lost the lead or gotten back in traffic, the race might have a completely different story, just as we saw with Truex. But Larson and crew chief Cliff Daniels ran a perfect race, and the No. 5 pit crew perfectly executed every pit stop to prevent that from ever happening.

The result was an absolute beatdown, and a beatdown in Thunder Valley that we may never see again.

Stephen Stumpf

Stephen Stumpf is the NASCAR Content Director for Frontstretch and is a three-year veteran of the site. His weekly column is “Stat Sheet,” and he formerly wrote "4 Burning Questions" for three years. He also writes commentaries, contributes to podcasts, edits articles and is frequently at the track for on-site coverage.

Can find on Twitter @stephen_stumpf.