Kyle Larson has won far and away more NASCAR Cup Series races than any other driver since 2021, his lone championship season.
But since going to Victory Lane at Kansas Speedway in May, Larson and his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team have struggled. At least by their lofty standards.
Sure, Larson made the playoffs and advanced beyond the opening round. But in the 18 races since the last visit to Kansas, Larson has gone uncharacteristically winless.
It’s little wonder, then, that Larson is happy to be back at the Kansas City track this weekend.
What’s Been Wrong With Kyle Larson Over The Last Few Months?
Despite making it into playoffs and through the Round of 16, Kyle Larson hasn’t had much to celebrate in recent times.
Since capturing three of the season’s first 12 races and establishing himself as the early championship favorite, Larson has posted only three top-five finishes. Over that 18-race stretch, he’s finished worse than 30th five times.
In the recent Round of 16, he failed to record a single top-10 finish over three events — advancing mainly due to the playoff points he managed to stack early in the regular season.
“The beginning of the season until the end of May was really good,” Larson said on Saturday at Kansas Speedway. “You kind of know what you’re going to get for results and stuff each week you go to the track, because we were just that strong. The schedule lined up really well for our organization — a lot of mile-and-a-halves and tracks that we were historically good at.
“And then the tracks that we haven’t been ‘lights out’ at, we were probably just a little bit worse than we have been in years prior. So, that just challenges you and your team mentally and emotionally sometimes.”
Larson says his Cliff Daniels-led group has “dealt with a lot as a team this year,” which he believes has factored into their drop-off in performance.
“I don’t know what other teams have dealt with,” Larson said. “But I don’t know if there’s a team that’s dealt with more than we have with losing a team member, pit crew swaps, different personnel changes. There’s just a lot that we’ve had to overcome.
“But I feel like we’ve worked really hard. And although the results may not show it all the time, I feel like we are building and better than we were, say, in June.”
Kansas Speedway Could Be A Turning Point For No. 5 Team
Although Kyle Larson is second among drivers yet to punch a ticket to the Round of 8 and holds a 41-point cushion over the first driver south of the cutline, he’s far from assured of advancing.
A win on Sunday at Kansas Speedway would provide that assurance — and signal a return to his traditional front-running ways, just in time to make a potential championship run.
Even with all the disappointment that late spring and summer brought him, Larson is justifiably upbeat about his chances at Kansas. After all, Larson didn’t just win at Kansas in May. He stomped the competition, leading 221 of 267 laps from the pole.
A DOMINATING WIN AT KANSAS FOR KYLE LARSON! pic.twitter.com/wgtyBFs9Ub
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) May 11, 2025
Larson owns a total of three Cup Series triumphs at the 1.5-mile track, all since joining Hendrick Motorsports in 2021.
“It gives you some confidence that it’s a place that we’ve ran well at for a long time now,” said Larson, who will start third in Sunday’s Hollywood Casino 400 Presented by ESPN Bet. “We’ll hopefully have similar speed to what we had earlier in the year. It sounds like we had a great week in the shop and in the wind tunnel.”
Even though Larson concedes he hasn’t personally given much thought to his losing streak, he believes a return to Victory Lane on Sunday would be huge for momentum and team morale.
“It would be impactful because I haven’t won a race since Kansas in May and really haven’t been that consistently good since this race earlier this year,” he said. “So, it would be nice to, obviously, get a win.
“We’ve been working extremely hard the last few months to get back to the point of where we were leading a bunch of laps and winning stages. And I feel like we’ve learned a lot along the way.”
