Inside Kyle Larson's throwback, manic pursuit of an Indy 500 legacy
INDIANAPOLIS -- If you are looking for Kyle Larson on this Monday night in May, you won’t find him in Indianapolis or Charlotte, the two hubs of his latest maniacal pursuit.
Instead, you have to trek out to a dirt track in Kokomo and wait for him on the wooden bleachers.
And there he emerges, in a Finley Farms white winged Sprint car, roaring onto soggy dirt and gliding around the corners of a quarter-mile oval track of semi-banked clay.
It’s the night before practice at the Indianapolis 500, and a man possessed enough to race in it while leading in the NASCAR Cup Series with the Coca-Cola 600 taking place that night is spending his off day here. He’s racing against working men and beginners gunning for a prize of $20,000.
He makes it seven laps into these spins on dirt before something happens. He’s trying to cut inside as another driver tries to dip around him in a tight battle for the fifth and final transfer spot. Their wheels collide, right as Larson is gliding around another turn, and his car flips and barrel rolls – one, two, three times – before landing upright on the track.
Immediately, three men hop out of a white truck armed with fire extinguishers checking for a flame. When they see none, NASCAR’s 2021 Cup Series champion emerges in a black and white racing suit.
A microphone and a camera approach as his green helmet comes off.
“I suck,” he says into the camera without a smile.
A smattering of applause breaks out on the wooden bleachers across the track. And now, everyone can wonder:
How does someone get insane enough to do all of this?
'It's going to be tremendous stress'
Larson is a chemical contradiction.
The 31-year-old who is a throwback to the days when drivers raced everywhere is also the one known as Yung Money, for the way he’s always creeping up on older competitors at every level he drives. He is a creature of habit and the sport’s most versatile driver, an American sensation with Japanese heritage who wants to be all things for all people.
Sometimes, the competing traits are enough to make a man flip over on a dirt track with nothing on the line.
“If you are a real race car driver, you want to race. You are born to race,” said Tony Kanaan, the 2013 Indianapolis 500 champion who is now coaching Larson as Arrow McLaren’s sporting director. “Kyle is the perfect example.”
And yet the pursuit he’s undertaking on Sunday is something almost nobody tries anymore.
He’s trying something called “The Double,” which means racing the Indianapolis 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 on the same day. If he can pull the whole event off, it’ll mean driving 1,100 miles in two distinctly different cars and covering more than 400 miles by plane from Indianapolis to Charlotte.
Four drivers have so far found a way to do the two races in one day, but only Tony Stewart in 2001 managed to complete all 1,100 miles. Stewart and Robby Gordon used to trade off attempts around that time, back when the 500 started more than an hour earlier than it does now.
MORE: Hunger, adrenaline and hallucination: Stories from 'the Double' drivers before Kyle Larson
In the past two decades, only one driver has attempted this feat. In 2014, Kurt Busch finished sixth in the 500 before missing the pre-race drivers meeting in Charlotte, starting at the back of the grid and stumbling to a 40th-place finish in the 600.
Larson can do the pre-race meeting virtually, but he faces what is currently a 60% chance of rain in Indianapolis on Sunday, as well as the risk of running into the extra security measures that can come if former President Donald Trump is also flying into Charlotte to attend the 600, which starts at 6 p.m.
Larson is currently in first place in the Cup standings with a 31-point lead over Martin Truex Jr. He has a league-high six top-five finishes and more than double the stage wins of any other driver – and yet he’ll risk that regular-season crown in three hours on a track in Indianapolis, driving faster speeds than he ever has, in a car he’s never used before this month.
“From 11 Sunday morning until 11:30 Sunday night,” Hendrick Motorsports owner Rick Hendrick Sr. said, “it’s going to be tremendous stress.”
And yet those anxieties slip away when Larson slides into the car.
“If he’s nervous, he doesn’t show it too much,” Hendrick said. “He just believes in his ability. Once he gets in the car and he gets comfortable, he wants to race. … He’s just a diehard racer.”
Larson has been telling fellow drivers for years that he was going to be the next one to pull this off.
The idea entered his head at the 2013 Indianapolis 500. He was 20 years old, months away from being of legal age to consume the cans of beer floating among the 300,000-plus fans packing the highest-capacity sports venue in the world. He was a NASCAR rookie, but on this day, he was completing “the Double” as a fan, flying by private jet from Indianapolis to Charlotte to take the two races in.
That day proved to be prophetic for Larson. Not only would he go on to be a champion in the second race, winning the 2021 Coca-Cola 600 en route to a Cup championship; but the driver he watched win the Indianapolis 500 that day was Kanaan, who is now his coach for the first half of this ultimate endurance test.
Larson began racing at the age of 7 in 1999, right at the peak of Jeff Gordon’s NASCAR dominance. Now, the man who won three Cup titles the four years before Larson hopped in a car is his vice chairman. His racing team is Larson’s racing team.
“He’s probably in the top three or five of anybody I’ve ever seen or raced with,” said Jeff Gordon, who joined Hendrick in this role in 2022. “… I used to be surprised by the things Kyle does behind the wheel. I’m not anymore.”
Larson is trying to have it all in an era where the demands of time, money, business and sheer human will force most drivers to wake up from those childhood dreams.
“To be successful in motor sports, you almost have to specialize,” said Jim Campbell, who runs the performance and motorsports side of Chevy and Cadillac. “He’s found a way to break that mold. He’s done it and he’s convinced his race partners that he’s better because of it.”
Larson gets to race so frequently that he doesn’t know how to slow himself down. His go-to celebration is to do burnouts while holding his steering wheel out the window, which has prompted warnings from NASCAR officials.
He was signing autographs after the 2015 Daytona 500 when he fainted due to dehydration. The next year at the All-Star race, he ran into the wall.
In the 2013 opener at the Daytona 500, on the same track that killed Dale Earnhardt Sr. when Larson was 9 years old, Larson crashed into the wall after a collision with Brad Keselowski and saw the front end of his car ripped off. The scraps flew into the crowd and injured more than 30 spectators.
In 2019 at Talladega, his car went airborne into the wall and barrell-rolled on the track.
He wrecks enough, like on that dirt track at Kokomo, that his now 6-year-old daughter Audrey is worried for what will happen on Sunday, when he drives a car unlike the ones she’s seen before. This Arrow McLaren Chevrolet positions her Daddy front and center and thrusts him at speeds of 232.8 miles per hour, the fifth-fastest of any driver entering the Indianapolis 500.
“To everybody else, it’s a way bigger deal to them than it is to me,” Larson said.
Larson is an addict for speed, and sometimes, it means driving at paces his car isn’t fully equipped to handle. The past two seasons, while trying to defend that 2021 Series championship, he’s had a tire blow out mid-race and received a fine for an unapproved hood louver. Both incidents led to suspensions for his crew chief, Cliff Daniels.
It all makes adjusting to a new car, and a faster one than he’s ever driven, as risky of a challenge as he’s undertaken in a life devoted to running as many races as he can.
“One of the things I would guard against for Kyle is he loves driving a loose race car, and IndyCars are not good cars to drive loose,” Stewart said in a video released by his marketing team. “You sit really far forward. You sit close to the front tire so if the back of the car moves, he’s going to feel that in his hands before he’s ever going to feel it in his body.
“By the time you feel that, sometimes it’s too late.”
'Adrenaline is a beautiful thing'
The last person who will worry about Larson on Sunday is Larson, and perhaps therein lies the secret to this psychotic pursuit.
“It’s something I’m not telling him,” Kanaan said of the challenges. “Adrenaline is a beautiful thing. … His biggest challenge won’t be physically. It will be mentally.”
Driving has long been the ultimate escape to drivers, who can load themselves into a car running at warped speed and worry only about the 30 yards in front of their face. Emotions, anxieties, fear and exhaustion can slip away at 232 miles per hour, the what-ifs and why-mes becoming more blurs in the rear-view mirror.
Larson is trying to trap himself in these moments, fulfilling a promise to that 20-year-old kid at this track that he wouldn’t be too big for them when they arrived. He’d never milked a cow until Tuesday, when he did the rookie tradition with no gloves on, so he could remember what it feels like.
He finished Saturday’s testing and immediately grabbed 6-year-old Audrey and 10-year-old Owen for a walk around the infield.
It’s in these moments with them that he transports further back, to the age between them, when he started racing in a go-cart. That's the part of him that does the donuts with the steering wheel off. It’ll have to be there Sunday, when he’ll drive and fly and drive again like a child with boundless energy.
It was there that night at that Kokomo Speedway, too, when he stared at a car with a wing bent downward and a wheel dented in, getting loaded up on a tow truck in dirt, and all he wanted to do was to fix it up and drive again.
Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Inside Kyle Larson's throwback, manic pursuit of an Indy 500 legacy
