Here's the thing about a 2.2 average finish: it completely breaks everyone else's math. As Motorsport.com reports, Kyle Larson and crew chief Cliff Daniels didn't even win on Sunday night at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the South Point Casino 400, yet they still managed to tighten their iron grip on the Chase for the Championship by extending their points lead to 40 at the halfway mark.
It started as an absolute disaster. The team scored just a single stage point in an awful first half where the car was loose, forcing Daniels to make a brave 26-second adjustment under green that cost them a lap. "How do you make that decision to make a big change? And obviously, that's what we elected to do under green versus trying to ride it out to the stage," Daniels explained.
I went up there to try to get a run and just spun out and obviously damaged the car,
That early pain paid off massively. Once they got back onto the lead lap, Larson charged forward on cycled tires, finishing 10th in the second break and nearly snatching the race win at the finish. It is giving everyone serious flashbacks to the dominant championship buzzsaw years of Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus with the Hendrick Motorsports No. 48 team.
Meanwhile, every single rival who had an opening to close the gap completely fumbled their opportunities. Denny Hamlin spun while running fourth at the end of the first stage, severely damaging his splitter and ending up 16th. Christopher Bell lost power steering in the third stage to finish 23rd after running up front early. Ty Gibbs sped on pit road to finish 17th, Joey Logano could only muster a 10th, and Ryan Blaney—despite a fifth-place finish—now desperately needs a win.
Hamlin's night was a comedy of micro-errors too. Had he stayed out during the caution instead of pitting, he would have trapped Larson a lap down and kept things even, but instead he spun while trying to make up lost track position. "I went up there to try to get a run and just spun out and obviously damaged the car," Hamlin said.
Larson now boasts a 2.0 average finish through five races, leaving the rest of the field praying that the law of averages finally catches up to the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 machine over the next month. Right now, it looks entirely unstoppable.
