If the inaugural NASCAR Cup Series event at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway is best remembered for the feud between Denny Hamlin and Ross Chastain, Sunday’s (Sept. 7) race there will be remembered for an incident between Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney. During the second stage, Larson and Blaney were racing in the top five, trying to catch the leaders as the stage approached its end. But on lap 135, Larson tapped Blaney from behind, sending the No. 12 spinning in turn 4. Although he kept his car out of the wall, Blaney lost his track position and was understandably heated at Larson.
After Sunday’s race ended, and Hamlin was celebrating with a victory burnout, an ominous scene unfolded on pit road. Larson got out of his car and debriefed with his team as Blaney stood nearby, waiting to have a chat with Larson. It appeared for a moment that a physical altercation could be brewing. However, cooler heads prevailed. Blaney and Larson simply talked and had a seemingly polite one at that. Yet judging by Blaney’s post-race comments, it was clear that some hard feelings linger.
“I just wanted to know what I did to deserve it,” Blaney said after his fourth-place finish. “He just said he made a mistake. That’s fine, make mistakes, but at the end of the day, I still got turned. He came all the way from the bottom of the racetrack and hit me in the left rear. I know he most likely didn’t mean to do it, but it happened anyway. So, that’s just one I gotta remember.”
Larson, who finished 12th, confirmed that the incident was an error.
“I just told him I messed up,” Larson said. “I wasn’t meaning to obviously go in there and hit him.
“(I) just misjudged the point of where I wasn’t going to get next to him, and tried to tuck in (behind him), and I just clipped him. All on me, but (it) wasn’t intentional. I hope he understands that.”
Blaney was rightfully irritated in the moment, but it is unlikely that the incident will have any ramifications going forward. Blaney is not the type of driver who thrives on controversy or stirs up drama over a minor accident. It probably helped the situation that Blaney got a top five (ahead of Larson) and is 42 points above the cut line going into the last race of the Round of 16. It would take a massive collapse at Bristol Motor Speedway for Blaney to get eliminated.
Larson is in even better shape. At 60 points above the cutoff, he is a virtual lock to advance to the round of 12. Neither his nor Blaney’s championship hopes were seriously harmed by what happened at Gateway. There is no reason for Larson to be looking over his shoulder for payback from the No. 12.
However, Sunday’s race did not really help Larson’s championship hopes either, which is a missed opportunity when you consider how fast his car was. Starting from the second position, Larson took the lead on lap seven and effortlessly gapped the field. After pitting during the first caution, he went flying through the pack on new tires and nearly caught back up to leader Chase Briscoe before the end of the first stage. What put Larson back in the field was the decision to pit under the caution from Ty Dillon’s crash on lap 76. Several other drivers stayed out, including stage two winner Bubba Wallace. Larson worked his way forward again and was advancing up the pylon until the incident with Blaney.
From there to the end of the race, Larson struggled to get his track position back. He ran into more trouble during a restart on lap 156, when Wallace’s car got stuck in gear. The No. 5 was directly behind the No. 23, and as Wallace struggled to get rolling, Christopher Bell hit the back of Larson’s No. 5 Chevrolet, knocking the rear diffuser loose. The No. 5 team had to return to pit road under caution a few laps later to fix the diffuser, costing Larson his track position once more. The extra stop potentially put Larson in position to reach the finish without returning to pit road, but Dillon’s second crash on lap 209 gave the leaders one more chance to pit under yellow; Larson ran out of laps to get back to the top 10.
Sunday’s race was the latest in a long stretch where Larson and his team struggled to match the level of performance that they set earlier in the season. That stretch includes the Southern 500, where Larson had a top-10 car early in the race but faded late and finished 19th.
Although Larson scored back-to-back top fives at Dover Motor Speedway and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he has not earned a top five in the six races since. He also has not won a race since his victory at Kansas Speedway on Mother’s Day. For a driver who has championship aspirations, those are concerning trends, especially with the playoffs now in full swing.
The good news for Larson is that Bristol is up next, and Thunder Valley has been his playground recently. He has won the last two races at Bristol, leading over 400 laps in both. Looking back further, Larson has three wins and six top fives in all six of his Bristol concrete races with Hendrick Motorsports. If that was not impressive enough, Larson has also posted 11 top 10s in his last 12 Bristol starts on concrete. He will be a contender in the Bristol Night Race, unless something goes seriously wrong.
If Larson wins at Bristol this week, all lingering concerns about Blaney or the No. 5 team’s performance will fade away. Blaney is not likely to retaliate against Larson, anyway. Blaney has a good shot at the championship too, and creating enemies over an accident is only going to make that path more difficult.
Yet if Larson does not run well at Bristol, he and the No. 5 team will have a lot of questions to answer. If Larson is going to win his second championship, this is the time of the year when he has to be at his very best. Lately, it feels too much like Larson’s best got left behind in the early weeks of the season. If Bristol turns into another lost opportunity, Larson will have bigger concerns to deal with than any retribution from Blaney.
Bryan began writing for Frontstretch in 2016. He has penned Up to Speed for the past eight years. A lifelong student of auto racing, Bryan is a published author and automotive historian. He is a native of Columbus, Ohio and currently resides in Southern Kentucky.