The Quiet Leader: How Kyle Larson’s Words Helped Spark Title Run

Homestead-Miami Speedway (Homestead, Fla.) — Kyle Larson, mired in a winless streak that would eventually reach 51 races, sat in a Hendrick Motorsports meeting listening to the other drivers and crew chiefs and team leadership discuss how they could get out of their funk. When it came to Larson’s turn to speak, a driver who previously was known to be relatively quiet delivered a powerful message. “Listen, nobody can beat us if we work together,” Larson said, according to his team owner Rick Hendrick. Hendrick pointed to that moment as a sign that Larson could lead Hendrick back to the front. The team was coming off a race where all four of the Hendrick drivers struggled to run in the top 20. The weight of trying to figure out the new Chevrolet body design had beaten the organization to one of the most down periods in recent years. Only Chase Elliott had won among the three drivers. “I remember it being just really sad in the room … and it was just sadness and everybody talking about how their confidence was down and decision-making isn’t where it needs to be because we’ve just been getting beat up on the race track,” Larson explained in his championship news conference. “It was getting close to my turn and I was like, ‘I still believe.’ We’re Hendrick Motorsports, whether it happens now or next year or whatever, I know we’ll eventually get to where we want to be, we’ve just got to trust ourselves.” Larson was right. The 34-year-old Larson earned his third NASCAR Cup Series title Sunday night, eight weeks removed from snapping that 51-race winless streak. He won three races — the 33rd, 34th and 35th Cup wins of his career — on his way to earning his third Cup title. The Hendrick Motorsports driver explained that the comment was rooted in him having competed at Chip Ganassi Racing for six-plus years with six wins. Since joining Hendrick in 2021, he has now won 29 races and three titles (2021, 2025, 2026). Larson didn’t think that he would emerge from that meeting to hoist the championship trophy. But he had the confidence they would get their mojo back — not from having been there, done that but more from having seen it and been beaten by it. “Living on the other side of the fence and competing against them, they’ve been in slumps before, they know the recipe to get out of it,” Larson said. “That’s just what I wanted to remind everybody. It might not be right now, but we have to have the belief we can get out of this.” The seventh seed entering the Chase, Larson performed so well that he just needed to finish 28th in the race Sunday to clinch the title. While other drivers and teams stepped on their feet and tripped over themselves over the 10-week Chase, Larson only had one bad race, which was a 34th at Phoenix. In addition to the three victories and the frustration at Phoenix, Larson posted two seconds, a fifth, a sixth and a ninth before finishing 12th at Homestead to capture the 10-race Chase. They worked together — with crew chief Cliff Daniels as the glue — and won the title with one of the best talents in the sport, one that is getting more comparisons to seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson. Larson’s 10-race Chase run included an epic win at Talladega where he led when taking the white flag, fell back to 11th and then rallied to win the race all in one lap. “He’s just an exceptional talent, this generation’s Jimmie, right?” regular-season champion Denny Hamlin told me and other reporters after the race. “That’s the only way you can kind of describe it. When it comes to playoff time, they perform their best, and that’s something that Jimmie used to do. “Jimmie was a guy that could get tons of speed out of the car. Kyle’s the same way. You could argue even more speed. There’s a little bit more variance in the results because of how hard he pushes it. But he reaps benefits because he gets lots of wins.” For Larson, he saw the fifth-place finish at Darlington as the key. “I really had no confidence, zero, before The Chase,” Larson said Thursday. “Hope, but no confidence. But I would really look at Darlington as the turning point of my confidence. I know we didn’t win, but I feel like we executed a really good day. We maximized what we had going for us that weekend and that day. “And I remember leaving that race thinking, man, that’s the first time it’s felt like the [No.] 5 team in forever. We were calling a race to win. I didn’t feel like we had been in that position for a long time. ” There was no stopping Larson after that. He won the following week at World Wide Technology Raceway (Gateway), as the team pulled together and found the speed. Just as Larson said. “That wasn’t Kyle Larson two years ago,” Hendrick said during the post-race news conference. “He wouldn’t have had that input to all the crew chiefs and the drivers. … Kyle actually took a leadership role.” Daniels remembered that well. His recollection during the post-race news conference was that Larson said something like, “‘Hey, just so everyone knows, we aren’t the fastest right now, but we’re still Hendrick Motorsports, so I have full confidence that we can come back and win this thing.” Just like Larson often makes the right move at the right time, he chose the right words for the right time. “That kind of hung with me and kind of resonated with a lot of folks that I think heard that message from him at the time of acknowledgment. We’re not good, things aren’t going well, but also the belief that we could pull together as the people, the team,” Daniels said. And the response is something that made Larson proud. “I could feel we were OK, but I definitely didn’t think we would go on the run we did in this final 10 weeks,” Larson said as he accepted the championship trophy. “To get three wins, be as consistent as we were, it’s just a true testament to Cliff’s leadership. … I knew whenever it came together, we would be ready. I just didn’t know it would be this year and at the time that it was.”