Kyle Larson was doing what he does best Sunday at Chicagoland, shadowing the top Toyotas. He isn’t quite good enough to beat them, but they know he’s there.
This particular Sunday he was running a comfortable third when, all by himself in turn four on the 93rd lap, his car spun as he exited the corner. And Larson couldn’t save it.
Instead, he slid across the wet infield grass, his tires going flat and tearing up the car’s underbody. Cup cars now have an underwing which covers the bottom of the car from the splitter in front to the diffuser in back.
It keeps the air flowing smoothly under the car and has totally changed how teams look at aerodynamics because with the underwing, creating aero doesn’t depend on the shape of the body to produce downforce. Instead, the air rushing under the car creates a vacuum which sucks the car down.
Eventually, Larson was able to get back out on the track, but his day was effectively over and he ended up 34th. “I thought I had a good corner going,” he told reporters after the race, “but a bump just bounced me loose and it was backwards in a hurry.
“I got stuck and when I got out of the grass, I had a flat. It dragged the bottom of the car off and I had no downforce the rest of the day,” Larson said. “Obviously, I made a mistake,” he added.
But why? Why would one of the most talented drivers in NASCAR suddenly lose control of his car when he’s all by himself, there are no mechanical issues and he hasn’t been hit by another car? It has to do with Chevy drivers getting a feel for what the car is doing.
Chevy got a new body in 2026 and, as Chase Elliott pointed out earlier this season, the drivers are all having difficulty telling when the new car has reached its limits. You want to go into, through and out of a corner right on the edge, but you don’t want to go over it. Go over it, and you’re in trouble, like Larson.
Despite the spin at Chicagoland, Larson has proven to be the only driver this year capable of challenging Toyota dominance, the only one who has been able to stand up and compete with Toyota on a consistent basis.
Toyota’s ability to run roughshod over Ford and Chevy is truly remarkable. At Chicagoland Sunday, Toyota’s had seven of the top 10 finishers, the first time in NASCAR history a single manufacturer has ever done that.
And while Elliott and Shane van Gisbergen have won two races each and Daniel Suarez also has a victory along with Ryan Blaney (Ford’s only win this year), none of them have been able to perform at a level high enough to break the Toyota stranglehold.
Including his two wins and using the Old Guy Sport competition index as a guide, Elliott has only been competitive in six of the 16 races and van Gisbergen is only competitive on road courses.
The OGS competition index does not include the three super speedway races run so far because the outcome of those races depends almost entirely on luck and tells you nothing about how a team has performed. But it does show how well Larson is running compared to everybody else trying to catch Toyota.
Heading into Sunday’s race at North Wilkesboro, Larson has 270 points. To put that in perspective, Ford’s four Penske drivers (the Wood brothers car is included in this group because it is built by Penske) and the three drivers for Ford’s other factory team, RFK, have combined for 317 points.
And excluding Hendrick, Chevy’s powerhouse team, the six drivers for Trackhouse and Spire, which also get factory support, have 367 points.
Not only that, but Larson is reasonably competitive with the gold standard in Cup racing, Denny Hamlin. Of the 16 races the OGS competition index has scored thus far this year, Hamlin has won four and finished in the top three four more times.
Larson has only been in the top three four times, but he has done well in some other scoring metrics. For example, Hamlin has scored points in 10 of the 16 races. Larson has scored points in 12. And Hamlin has scored points for leading laps under green in 10 races, Larson 11.
So he’s getting there, and the top Toyotas know it. It’s an old axiom in NASCAR that before you can win, you have to first put yourself in position to win, and Larson has been putting himself in position to win.
Chase Briscoe, who won Sunday’s race at Chicagoland, understands the position he – and Toyota – are in and that the Toyotas need to strike now while they have an edge.
“It (having an advantage over your rivals) goes in ups and downs,” Briscoe commented after his Chicagoland win on NASCAR.com’s website. “A year from now, the Toyotas could be way off and the Chevys and Fords could be unbelievable.
“When you are good, you have to take advantage of it,” Briscoe continued, “especially at the types of tracks where the Toyotas are typically the best, the mile and a halves.
“When you come to a mile and a half, you cannot have a bad day. You need to take advantage of it, because it’s not very often you have a race-winning car and when you have them, you have to try to win,” he emphasized.
JGR team owner Joe Gibbs watched as three of his four cars, Briscoe, Christopher Bell and Hamlin, finished one-two-three at Chicagoland with the fourth, Ty Gibbs, eighth and Michael Jordan’s 23XI entries sandwiched around them. Bubba Wallace was sixth, Corey Heim ninth and Riley Herbst 10th.
“It’s great,” Gibbs said of his team’s and Toyota’s dominance. “I’ve said before that the hardest thing to do is stay up in pro sports. Everybody realizes what great teams we’ve got out there.
“This is the best series in the world for racing cars,” Gibbs declared. “Everybody is working extremely hard. It was a battle today (Sunday) and it was great to get the 19 (Briscoe) across the finish line first.
“We know how hard everybody else is working,” Gibbs continued. “So we know, you know, how competitive this is. One week doesn’t buy you the next week. As a matter of fact, we have been telling everybody at our place ‘hey, let’s work even harder’ because we know everybody else is working so hard.
“It’s really hard to just stay up there and keep performing like this,” Gibbs said. “I think we’ve got great people. I think all four cars, right now, I feel real good when we go to the racetrack. I think we’re capable of winning with all four cars.”
But Gibbs knows you can’t coast no matter how good you are. In NASCAR, they say if you’re not getting better you’re falling behind. And Kyle Larson is coming.
NASCAR NOTES: No race this week. Old Guy Sport does not count super speedway races (Atlanta, Daytona and Talladega) in its standings because the outcome is determined primarily by luck and has little to do with how a team or driver performs.
