Dale Earnhardt wasn’t the type to like candy bars. But Earnhardt loved winning races, pleasing sponsors, and trolling his enemies, and not in that order. So he would have appreciated the display from Kyle Larson and his team right after Larson won his third NASCAR Cup Series championship on Sunday night.
Flanked by team owner Rick Hendrick, crew chief Cliff Daniels and Earnhardt’s former rival Jeff Gordon, Larson et al. performatively snacked on Snickers. This decision was a long-standing attack on Denny Hamlin, who said earlier in the season that Hendrick wasn’t up to his standards and needed a Snickers to come back to his old self. Vengeance is best served in Homestead with a trophy at your side.
(Snickers is no longer a sponsor of NASCAR, and when they were, they aligned themselves with Joe Gibbs Racing, but that kind of positive exposure might entice them to return.)
Advertisement
The fact is that Hamlin was right, and Larson admits it. He had some decent runs early in the season, including a second-place finish at Kansas and third-place finishes at Bristol and Phoenix. But he also had absolute bombs; he finished 32nd or lower in four of the first 11 races of the year. That’s not exactly championship pedigree.
“At the beginning of the year, it was just like, ‘My God, we’re so bad right now,'” Larson told Yahoo Sports Monday morning, less than 24 hours after hoisting the championship trophy. “I was just like, ‘Man, this is going to be a miserable year. How are we going to get through this?’ So to end the year with a championship, it’s just insane.”
Larson ran well enough to finish the regular season seventh in the standings, but he wasn’t really a serious playoff threat. He hadn’t won a race in 51 attempts, and there was no indication he was about to start any time soon.
“I felt like we were still capable of winning if things went well,” he said. “And I was still racing on dirt and winning at that, so I think that gave me the motivation that I know how to drive, we just need to get our cars a little closer together. I’m sure it felt longer to Cliff, but to me it wasn’t too bad. I just stayed committed to our process.”
Advertisement
And then it all paid off, all at once.
“Once the Chase started and we went to Darlington – we didn’t win, but we finished fifth – I felt like we had just run a really good race and our car was pretty fast,” he said. “I was like, ‘All right, we can keep this going, and we’ll see what happens. And then, boom, we went to Gateway the next week and won. Really from that point on, it was like, okay, we’re certainly in this.”
He was more than “in” the playoffs, he was responsible for them. Starting with that Gateway win and moving through Bristol, Kansas and Las Vegas, Larson put together an astonishing run, finishing 1-2-1-2 to take a huge playoff lead. A late-season victory at Talladega, Larson’s first at a superspeedway, virtually iced the championship and turned Sunday into a high-speed crowning achievement.
Kyle Larson virtually clinched his third Cup title with a victory at Talladega in October.
(Karl Anderson via Getty Images)
“In sports, confidence can really take you a long way,” he said. “Our confidence built very quickly. It was just crazy to see how that turned into good results every week.”
Advertisement
NASCAR’s new Chase format was intended as a throwback of sorts, a design aimed at rewarding consistency, keeping more drivers active in the playoffs and reducing the gimmicks associated with the playoff rounds of the past decade. But Larson basically broke the format by running so well in the first five races and outrunning every challenger at Talladega. As a result, he ran a largely drama-free race in the season finale at Homestead with the title all but assured. He didn’t even realize he had won the title until, disappointingly, he was informed on the radio that he was the 2026 champion.
“They declared it,” Daniels told Larson during the second stage of the race.
“It’s done ?” Larson responded.
“It’s over,” Daniels said.
Advertisement
“It was disappointing,” Larson said, “but it’s cool.”
“I thought I had to finish third (in the first stage) to gain the points I needed to get the victory,” he said on Monday. “So I finished fourth and I said to myself, ‘All right, we still have to go for one more point.’ I didn’t even think about locking it, so I was a little surprised (to get the call) and I didn’t know how to react. I was just happy and relieved, I guess, to get that result early on.”
Larson’s third title puts him in rare company, tying him with legends like Darrell Waltrip, Tony Stewart and Cale Yarborough. Only four men – Richard Petty, Jimmie Johnson, Earnhardt and Gordon – hold more titles than Larson. He has won championships in two different formats, the 2021 and 2025 playoffs, and this year’s 10-race all-in Chase.
Another reason Earnhardt, who won his fifth championship a few months before Larson was born, would have loved the now three-time champion: Larson never stops racing. He’ll be back at it this weekend, racing midget and sprint cars in California.
Advertisement
After a family vacation in the Bahamas, he will begin the home stretch of his training for the California International Marathon – yes, a running race – in early December. He spent the second half of the NASCAR season training, including a 15-mile race in the Florida heat two days before Homestead, and is ready to take on a different style of racing. There is no giving up in this guy.
“I’m excited about it,” he said. “I don’t have super high expectations or anything.”
The last time Kyle Larson entered a race without sky-high expectations, he won a championship. We’re not saying he’s going to break records or qualify for the Olympics in his next act, but we’re not saying that. not saying that either.
Gn sports
