While this review needed to wait a few weeks, given the Kyle Busch tragedy, it’s time to take a look at the Amazon Prime documentary Kyle Larson vs. The Double, released in advance of the Sunday (May 24) before Memorial Day — when, of course, the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 ran back-to-back.
The Double is obviously when a driver attempts to run both races to completion in the same day: participating in all the Indy pageantry before the Greatest Spectacle in Racing kicks off in Indiana, then jetting and helicoptering southeast to North Carolina for NASCAR’s longest race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
I talked with director Cynthia Hill a few weeks back about the process that went into making this documentary, one that turned into chronicling two attempts at the Double after Kyle Larson‘s 2024 attempt went awry thanks to heavy rain ending the 600 by the time he got there.
The good thing about all of these NASCAR productions on Prime — American Thunder: NASCAR to Le Mans, the latest Full Speed entry being a documentary about the 2026 Daytona 500, NASCAR vs. Navy: The San Diego Mini Movie (which we’ll get to soon) — is that none of them have been bad. Nothing has been severely lacking in anything, and all the documentary crews have done really great, thorough jobs with their respective productions.
Kyle Larson vs. The Double is an interesting documentary in that there are so many facets to cover. With Larson’s dual attempts, that certainly meant the crew had to fit more into the runtime, along with his background, non-NASCAR efforts, 2020 controversy and more.
I think Hill and co. did a great job fitting all of this into a digestible runtime, for sure, while still remaining focused on the Double attempts and tying everything together.
The most interesting part is that, unlike a lot of documentaries, this doesn’t have the triumphant end moment that others do. American Thunder had the successful debut of NASCAR at Le Mans. Valiant ends with the Vegas Golden Knights making the Stanley Cup Final in their first year of NHL existence. 199 Lives culminates in Travis Pastrana completing the world’s first double backflip in competition at the X Games. Things like that. Instead, this documentary ends with Larson crashing out of both Double attempts in 2025.
In 2024, rain delayed the start at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and while he finished the race, Justin Allgaier had to hop in the No. 5 before Larson got there — and by that time, the rain that foiled Larson in Indy had hit the Charlotte area and thwarted any chance of running a single Cup lap.
The next year, Larson wrecked out of the Indy 500, meaning he certainly got to Charlotte on time, but then he had a couple incidents in the 600 — an early spin followed by getting involved in a later, larger crash.
I think the documentary does a really good job of showing how taxing making these attempts was on Larson without donning rose-colored glasses too much. It relies less on the attempt being enough (though the undertaking is incredible in its own right) and more on how disappointed Larson was as a driver, and showing how much this means to him.
I also enjoyed its focus on the familial aspects, particularly on wife Katelyn’s outlook and how son Owen has begun getting into racing as well.
Above all else, this documentary shows just how difficult even attempting (and reaching) both legs of the Double is, let alone to do well in either or both of them. While Katherine Legge might not have had the cars underneath her to compete for the win in either event this year, I hope any detractors of her attempting the feat watch this and understand just how much of an undertaking it is.
Legge got caught up in an incident not of her own doing in Indy, sacrificing her own race to avoid T-boning Ryan Hunter-Reay, and while the No. 78 isn’t top-tier equipment on the NASCAR side, she finished all but a handful of miles.
And all the attempts over the past several decades, and the inside look this documentary offers, makes the two times Tony Stewart did it (particularly finishing all 1,100 miles with sixth- and third-place finishes in 2001) look all the more impressive. Forget the physical toll — the mental toll, amount of stress and all the frayed nerves have to be unbelievable.
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch and also hosts the Adam Cheek's Sports Week podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.
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