If going a lap down cannot stop Kyle Larson from making a recovery, we aren’t sure what will. After a dominant start to the Chase, the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports driver has left his opponents feeling defeated. And everyone is searching for a glimmer of hope.
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Even Chase Briscoe, who won the race in Las Vegas and picked up 75 points, still trails Larson by 84 points. Briscoe believes he is still in the title fight, but he and his crew chief James Small know they need a miracle.
“You need days like we had on Sunday, times two or three in order to close the gap,” said Small on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “Especially if the 5 team continues to perform at the level they have been, and it’s quite phenomenal to watch what they’ve been doing. And maybe it can’t last forever. And if it does, then they deserve to win because it’s a pretty incredible run they’re on.
“So yeah, for us, it’s just all we can do to win, and then we’ll see how it stacks up. But still plenty of racing left to go, and we’ve seen the first five races have been all over the place with things going on, mechanical failures, and incidents. So, I’m sure at some point trouble might come to them, but we’ll just have to see what happens.”
Briscoe’s gap to Larson would have been even smaller had he won in Kansas. Larson had a perfect points day in Kansas, where he won both stages and also won the race. That was the race that changed the face of the Chase, and it was Briscoe who could have changed things up.
Briscoe overtook Larson during the closing stages of the race in Kansas and led 23 laps. But with just seven laps to go, Larson overtook Briscoe, who attempted a fight back. As he tried to wrestle the HMS No. 5 for the lead, Briscoe got loose, hit the outside wall, and lost whatever momentum he had built. Briscoe finished the race in 4th.
If Briscoe won in Kansas, Larson wouldn’t have picked up the 55 points that the winner gets. Instead, he would have finished on 55 points total: 35 for second place and ten points for each stage win. That scenario would have made the Chase tighter.
But Larson’s Kansas win came on the back of a win at Gateway and a second-place finish in Bristol. When he drove from being a lap down on lap 35 in Vegas to finish second, Larson showed not just his championship caliber, but also his ability to turn a bad day into a good one.
What Briscoe’s crew chief is hoping for is that the No. 5 has at least one low-points-scoring day. But HMS has unlocked something in Larson that they are yet to figure out with even their other two Chase cars, the No. 9 driven by Chase Elliott and William Byron’s No. 24 Chevy.
Bryon is 12th, and Elliott is 13th, with neither driver showing performance anywhere near what Larson has shown. What’s really scary for the rest of the pack is the No.5’s unreal 2.2 average finish in five Chase races.
Five down and five to go, NASCAR is heading into Charlotte for the sixth race, and that was the track at which the season started to change for Larson. He finished fifth in the rain-curtailed Coca-Cola 600 after he and crew chief Cliff Daniels decided to take their car back to how it was in 2025, when Larson won the championship.
Larson had been working overtime in the simulator, trying various setups on his car in the offseason period. Somewhere along that process, Larson started feeling like the car wasn’t working how he hoped it would. After hitting the reset button in Charlotte, Larson and his No. 5 team began to get back to their usual rhythm, peaking just when he needed to.
Even Denny Hamlin, who is 40 points behind Larson, expects the HMS driver to have a bad race. Hamlin wasn’t wishing it or hoping for it like Small. The No. 11 JGR driver’s logic was the law of averages.
Hamlin himself has had a few bad days and, based on the law of averages, he believes that those days are likely to come for Larson too, sooner or later. But with just five races to go, even if Larson has two more solid points days, it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to catch up to him.
The requirement now for Briscoe, Hamlin, or any other driver to beat Larson to the title doesn’t depend only on them winning a race with maximum points, but also on Larson’s bad day coinciding with those wins.