Monday marks the one-year mark since Kyle Larson last won a NASCAR Cup Series race, a triumph that came on May 11, 2025 at Kansas Speedway, and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 team is still working through things early this season too.
Larson finds himself eighth in the championship standings, needing to be within the top-5 by the end of the regular season to be a bonafide championship contender. And sure, they won the championship in November under the previous format, but they just have been a little off of their usual standards.
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How cognizant is Larson of the one-year winless streak, which is now at 36 races?
“I mean, I think you guys pay attention to it way more than I pay attention to it,” Larson said during a press conference over the weekend at Watkins Glen. “But yeah, obviously I would have loved to have won to this point, but we just haven’t been good enough. I feel like at times, we’re really close to getting a win. And then at other times, I feel like we’re far from getting a win. I just kind of shows how tough this series is.
“But yeah, I don’t know. We’re working really hard. I say the same thing every time you guys ask… it’s not like we’re not trying to win. We’re just kind of searching of how to be better and sometimes maybe search too much and get off track a little bit.”
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His crew chief, Cliff Daniels, says the key is just staying emotionally stoic,
“We’re very aware that we haven’t won on a Sunday,” Daniels said last month at Bristol Motor Speedway. “And yes, the championship is one thing, but we haven’t taken the checkered flag in probably a calendar year by now. With our evolution of the team and probably being a little bit more seasoned in how we handle some of these things, I think, more than ever, now we know that we can’t get emotional, get sad.”
A positive, even as Hendrick Motorsports on the whole is still trying to find its groove with the new Chevrolet body, is that their teammates in the No. 9 car are off to the best start of their tenure together. It’s just a matter of Larson and company executing at that same level.
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“But you know, Chase (Elliott) has had a good start to the year, but the rest of us have been kind of off, so we’re still trying to work through it,” Larson said. “We’re just going to keep fighting. We’ve made this sport, the Cup Series, look easy at times, and I never thought it was, so I’m glad that we can show you that it’s not easy.”
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