Kyle Larson returned to the NASCAR All-Star race and won it for the second time, earning another $1 million.
After a slick three-wide pass for the lead, Larson held off a hard-charging Brad Keselowski in the final 10-lap shootout in Texas on Sunday night, propelling Hendrick Motorsports to its second straight win and 10th overall in the annual non-points race with a seven-figure reward.
Chase Elliott, the defending All-Star winner and reigning Cup champion, started the sixth and final phase of the 100-lap race in lead, but he didn’t last long.
Larson pushed his teammate to the outside of the fourth turn and took the lead. Before Keselowski pulled ahead briefly at the line, Larson surged ahead and stayed ahead for the final eight laps.
“That last restart worked out exactly how I needed it to. I wanted Chase to not get a good run down the back,” Larson said.
“Thankfully, I think (Keselowski) got to his inside, and I just shoved him down the back and he probably thought I was going to just follow him and I was like, there’s got to be enough grip where we’d be running for one corner,” he said. “It was a little slick up there but I was able to get it and hold him off from there. I can’t believe it.”
Larson claimed that he had practically all four tires in a groove above the area where they had been doing laps. He’d already determined that if given the chance, he’d go for it.
“No points on the line … If I wreck, I wreck,” he said.
Crew chief Cliff Daniels said he didn’t even think there was a lane up there, “and he put it up there, and it stuck.”
Larson has gone to Victory Lane three weekends in a row, for a total of four visits this season.
Running second to Hendrick cars these days, according to Keselowski, is an accomplishment.
“They’re just stupid fast, and I had him off of Turn 4 but they just have so much speed,” Keselowski said. “He just motored right on back by me, like damn.”
Larson won the 2019 All-Star race while driving for Chip Ganassi Racing. He was suspended for six months after uttering a racial slur on a livestream while competing in a virtual race during the epidemic, so he missed last year’s main event in Bristol. Rick Hendrick provided him a chance to return to the Cup Series this season after that nearly cost him his career.
Larson became only the eighth driver to win a two-time All-Star race, with ten races remaining before the playoffs.
Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, and Alex Bowman finished first, second, and third, respectively. In the 21-car lineup, William Byron, Aric Almirola, Kyle Bush, and Kurt Busch rounded out the top ten.
In the final section, Hendrick drivers Elliott, Byron, and Larson began 1-2-3, with Penske drivers Ryan Blaney, Keselowski, and Joey Logano starting 4-6. During the 30-lap fifth segment, Elliott went from third to first, with a required four-tire stop and a $100,000 award for the crew that made the fastest stop.
“Kyle got to my outside and that was the end of it, really. Just got beat,” Elliott said.
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Byron won the fourth section and finished fourth overall in the first four 15-lap segments. For the first three phases, Larson, Blaney, and another Hendrick driver, Bowman, finished first, second, and third, respectively.
During prerace introductions on a scorching night deep in the heart of Texas, drivers appeared through the saloon doors on a massive facade while their cars were rolled through a corral gate. While the drivers warmed up, rocker Sammy Hagar played “I Can’t Drive 55” from the stands, ending the song just at the green flag.
The All-Star race will be held in Texas for the third time in three years. Before moving out of North Carolina last summer because to COVID-19 regulations, Charlotte Motor Speedway hosted it 34 of the first 35 years.
The All-Star race in Texas served as a send-off and a full-circle finale for old-school NASCAR promoter Eddie Gossage, who was working his final day for Speedway Motorsports.
For at least two years, Gossage, who is now 62, had considered stepping down. Bruton Smith, the founder of Speedway Motorsports, picked him to oversee the 1,500-acre complex since its groundbreaking in 1995, two years before the track’s first Cup race, which featured a catastrophic crash in the first turn of the first lap.
In 1992, he was a young public relations director at Charlotte when one of his pranks set Smith’s hair on fire during a news conference to promote NASCAR’s first nighttime All-Star race. Sparks flew as Smith threw the enormous light switch that Gossage had rigged to promote the Charlotte speedway’s new lighting system.
Three decades after he thought he was headed for the unemployment line, Gossage is going out on his own terms. He planned to spend Monday at the pool with his three grandchildren.
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