Holding a Pretty Wheel: Is Kyle Larson’s Chase Emergence History Repeating Itself?

Kyle Larson’s year certainly has been an interesting one. He entered as the last of the playoff-era champions. He had some bad luck in the first half of the regular season but racked up plenty of top 10s and hovered around the top half of The Chase contenders. As summer ground on, Larson struggled a bit, dropping as low as 10th in the standings, before rebounding a bit late. 

After the first 26 races, when NASCAR reset the points for the Chase field, Larson was seventh, 55 points back. Not an insurmountable margin, but it was after a summer which included a stretch of five races with four finishes of 33rd or worse and a top finish of just 15th.

Then The Chase started. And four races in, Larson has two wins and a 26-point lead in the standings. A solid start, a summer slump with a handful of uncharacteristic results, and now a red-hot Chase — it all seems to be an unlikely scenario.

Except we’ve seen it all before. 

Larson’s swing was a little more pronounced, but his season, to a good degree, mirrors the approach of the driver Larson replaced at Hendrick Motorsports: Hall of Famer Jimmie Johnson, who won six titles under the Chase system the first time it was used.

Johnson retired from full-time NASCAR competition after the 2020 season with Larson filling the fourth seat at Hendrick Motorsports in 2021, though he took over the No. 5 — with Johnson’s former crew — while Alex Bowman took the driver’s seat of Johnson’s old number 48.

Johnson, along with crew chief Chad Knaus, mastered The Chase format. Not only did they win six of the 10 titles decided by The Chase system, but they also won more Chase races than anyone by a ridiculously large margin. While Johnson was already the winningest driver of his era, he shined in the title run, year after year. He only finished outside the top five once under The Chase format.

While Johnson was driving the cars, Knaus was the mechanical mastermind supporting Johnson’s five-year title rampage as well as his sixth and seventh championships. He engineered those title runs as carefully as he engineered race setups.

More than a decade after Johnson’s last Chase title in 2013, Knaus is still calling the shots at Hendrick Motorsports, albeit now from the Competition Director role. And he hasn’t forgotten how he managed The Chase as a crew chief.

During Johnson’s title binge, his fans often fretted during the summer months as the wins seemingly slowed considerably. The team played it off as bad luck (and some of it was), but it always seemed like there was more to it. Johnson would take one on the chin at tracks similar to those on The Chase docket, even the intermediates at which he excelled. 

In hindsight, though nobody has ever admitted to it outright, it’s likely that a lot of those summer races where Johnson seemed to struggle were simply test sessions for later in the year. 

By summer, he was always in a points position where a clunker or three wouldn’t hurt his chances of making The Chase, and a few top 15s that might otherwise had been top 10s or top fives didn’t make much difference. But trying out a setup tweak here and an adjustment or two there might make a real difference later, particularly if the team didn’t tip their hand.

Not all of Larson’s rough summer, or his winless drought of over 50 races, was him trying things for The Chase. Some of those finishes were truly terrible luck. Some of the issues was Chevrolet being behind the Toyotas until NASCAR made some changes to equalize them (perhaps those teams did tip their hand a bit too far).

But maybe part of it was HMS pulling out their old Chase notebooks and remembering that they were the masters at making The Chase work for them.

If that’s the case, Larson might just have history on his side.