Kyle Larson Won a Championship with 187 Laps Still to Run

HOMESTEAD, Fla.

"Uh, they've declared it," Cliff Daniels told his driver, 80 laps into a 267-lap race. "We got it." Kyle Larson's answer, over the radio, was the whole afternoon in one breath: "That was anticlimactic."

Anticlimactic is what a championship looks like when the math closes early. Larson came into the Straight Talk Wireless 400 needing nine points to make his third NASCAR Cup Series title untouchable, and he took eight of them the first chance the race offered: fourth place in Stage 1, worth seven stage points, on top of the point he banked for starting the race. Christopher Bell finished the stage third and Denny Hamlin sixth, and when the segment ended the arithmetic had nowhere left to go — Bell trailed by 66 points with exactly 66 still available, and Larson owned the tiebreaker. The title was settled with 187 laps still on the board. NASCAR's own live blog stamped the official declaration at Lap 82.

Stage 1 ended under a caution that told its own story about this track. Chase Briscoe had won Saturday's pole at 166.687 mph and led the first 34 laps; on Lap 78 his No. 19 Toyota's engine let go, and the season's last first stage closed behind the pace car. Tyler Reddick won the stage, Ryan Blaney ran second, Bell third, Larson fourth. Hamlin took Stage 2. Larson scored nothing in it, and by then it didn't matter — he was racing the rest of the afternoon as a champion with a damaged car, which is its own kind of summary for how this title was won.

Consider where this team stood in August. Larson went winless through the entire 26-race regular season — three DNFs between Daytona and Iowa, five more finishes of 30th or worse, no top-10 at all between late June and mid-August. When the drought finally broke, he did it sideways: a sixth at Richmond on August 15, then a sprint to Iowa to win the Knoxville Nationals and its $200,000. He wrecked out of the regular-season finale at Daytona anyway. Then Bristol handed him second place and the points lead, and he never gave it back.

The Chase was a different driver in the same suit. A fifth at Darlington opened it, then the wins arrived in a rush — Gateway ended a 51-race winless streak, Kansas was a rout (both stages swept, 235 laps led, the maximum 76 points), and Talladega gave him the first superspeedway win of his career, charged from 11th to first on the final lap of an overtime photo finish. That afternoon alone moved his championship lead from five points to 73. Across the Chase's first six races he never finished worse than sixth; his average finish over that stretch, 2.83, is the best six-race postseason run since the format began in 2004, per Chevrolet's championship release.

It nearly came apart anyway. At Phoenix, a tire failure with 29 laps left put him in the Turn 1 wall: 34th place, three points, and a 49-point lead cut to five with seven drivers inside 56. A week later at Martinsville he went a lap down early, scored no stage points, and needed the free pass after Bell and Hamlin spun each other to climb back to ninth. That ninth is the reason Sunday's arithmetic was so forgiving. He arrived at Homestead 67 points clear of Bell and 70 clear of Hamlin, and the finale — back at this track for the first time in seven years, Phoenix having hosted the decider since 2020 — was the first championship race of the revived Chase format: ten races, sixteen drivers, no eliminations.

Homestead suits him anyway. Larson has led 645 laps here, more than any driver in Cup Series history at this track, and he won the most recent Cup race run on it before Sunday, in March 2025. The place asked almost nothing of him this time. He qualified fourth, collected his stage points, and watched the fight happen in other people's mirrors.

The race still had a race inside it. Larson clipped the wall in Stage 2, cut a right-rear tire, and faded to 17th in the segment on old rubber; a pit-road stack-up at the Stage 3 restart left the No. 5 with diffuser damage, and he spent the closing laps running 20th. None of it touched the standings. Up front, William Byron led the field to a restart with eight laps left after Daniel Suárez spun; Reddick took the lead with six to go, and Blaney — who led seven laps all day — passed him in the final laps and won by 0.314 seconds, his fourth victory of the season. Larson crossed the line 12th. The final table reads Larson 2,501 points, Bell 2,452 — a 49-point championship margin for a driver whose title was decided before the race was a third old.

The company he joins is short. Three Cup titles make Larson the 11th driver in history with at least three, alongside Lee Petty, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Tony Stewart and Joey Logano — with Jeff Gordon's four above them and the seven-title tier of Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson above that. Back-to-back makes him the 11th driver to repeat as champion and the first since Johnson, whose five straight ended in 2010; Larson is also the only driver besides Johnson to win titles under both the old Chase and the elimination-playoff formats. At 34, he is the third-youngest driver ever to reach three, behind only Gordon and Johnson. His 29 Cup wins since 2020 are the most of any driver this decade.

All three of his championships — 2021, 2025, this one — came with Cliff Daniels calling the shots at Hendrick Motorsports, a pairing that started in 2021. Daniels, who was a race engineer on Johnson's 2016 title team, is just the second crew chief to win three championships in his first seven seasons; Ray Evernham did it with Gordon in the 1990s. For Hendrick, this is a record 16th Cup championship spread across five different drivers — Johnson's seven, Gordon's four, Larson's three, and one each for Terry Labonte and Chase Elliott — and Chevrolet's 35th driver title, won in the latest Camaro ZL1's debut season.

The three Larson title runs share a driver and almost nothing else. In 2021 he won ten races and the Phoenix finale outright. In 2025 he never led a lap in the finale and took the trophy third, on Daniels' late two-tire call, while Hamlin's dominant afternoon slipped away. This one had no signature moment at all — just ten weeks of a team that couldn't win in July refusing to lose in the fall. "This one I'll remember forever because of just the season that it was and the struggle that it was," Larson said afterward. "I really had no confidence, zero, before the Chase. Hope, but no confidence. I would really look at Darlington as that (being) the turning point of my confidence." Of Daniels: "there's no better leader in the sport than him."

The men who chased him described the other side of a slow clinch. "I felt like (losing the championship) last year was like a sudden death," Hamlin said, "and this one was just a slow bleed." Bell was blunter: "We all shot ourselves in the foot one way or another." There was one footnote of levity before any of it started — Larson was the only Cup driver invited to Thursday's championship media day, an appearance he called "awkward," and the No. 5 team's qualifying-day debate, per the Associated Press, was whether a hot dog is a sandwich and whether cereal is a soup. Larson's rulings: the hot dog is not a sandwich, and cereal is absolutely not a soup.

Jeff Burton, calling the race for NBC, landed on the line that follows Larson everywhere: "He wins in everything he does, and they're all completely different cars and tracks." On Sunday the win was a fourth-place stage finish and a radio call before halfway. The trophy counts the same.