NASCAR: Kyle Larson's Richmond win shows why Hendrick is the clear team to beat so far in 2023

Hendrick Motorsports is the team to beat in 2023 both on the track and in an appeal hearing.

Kyle Larson got his first win of the season and the third of the season for Hendrick on Sunday at Richmond. The win came four days after Hendrick was able to convince an appeals panel that the massive points penalties NASCAR levied against the team for improper parts at Phoenix in March should be taken away.

"It doesn't really change my outlook for the rest of the season," Larson said about his first win of 2023. "I felt like, yes, we got hit with 100 points and all that, but I felt like our race car is really fast all year long."

"So I knew we were going to have many opportunities to win. Yeah, we were just able to do that today, and I know we're going to have more opportunities going forward."

Larson got back to the front of the field in the final stage after his team fixed damage to his right front bumper from contact with Daniel Suarez on pit road. He led 93 of the race’s 400 laps and finished ahead of teammate Josh Berry in his best finish as a substitute driver for the injured Chase Elliott.

Points leader Alex Bowman finished eighth and William Byron — the only driver in 2023 who has multiple wins — led 117 laps and finished 24th after he went spinning off the bumper of Christopher Bell on a restart with less than 20 laps to go.

Byron is still in fourth in the points standings thanks to the rescinding of the points penalty while Larson is now tied for sixth. Had the points penalty stayed in place, Larson would be tied for 21st in the standings.

NASCAR levied 100-point penalties and $100,000 fines on each of Hendrick’s four cars and suspended the team’s four crew chiefs for four races after it deemed the louvers on the hoods of the team’s cars were improper ahead of the March race at Phoenix. NASCAR also docked each Hendrick car 10 playoff points, effectively rendering Byron’s two wins so far this season meaningless when it comes to bonus points for the playoffs.

Hendrick immediately said it would appeal NASCAR’s decision and based its public case for the appeal largely on NASCAR’s parts rules for Cup Series cars. Starting in 2022, Cup Series cars have been made mostly from parts from single-source suppliers. While NASCAR dropped the hammer on teams for parts modifications last season, Hendrick said the louvers it was getting from the NASCAR-approved supplier weren’t all exactly alike.

The case worked, at least in the most important ways. While the appeals panel kept the four-race suspensions in place for each of Hendrick’s four crew chiefs and also kept the $400,000 in fines intact, it removed the 100-point penalties for each team and the 10-point playoff penalties. And while it wasn’t exactly the outcome that Hendrick wanted, the removal of the penalties was more than good enough.

"I just think we were very transparent from the beginning of why we believed there was a miscommunication and what happened," Hendrick's Jeff Gordon said.

"I said this in Atlanta. It should have never even come to that. I don't want to give too much information because I want to respect the process, but it's also a little frustrating that nothing gets shared from what determines whether there's points given back or whether there's money not given back and crew chief suspensions.

"I just feel like there was enough there that it's not clear-cut. It's not just a black-and-white situation because there was enough communication to justify why we showed up to the race track in Phoenix the way we did."

NASCAR issued a statement after the ruling that said it was glad the panel agreed Hendrick had violated NASCAR rules though it disagreed with the rescinding of the points penalties. It was the second consecutive time an appeals panel had kept a penalty intact but removed the points deduction from the punishment against a Hendrick driver after Byron purposely spun Denny Hamlin at Texas in the fall of 2022.

The appeal ruling immediately caused confusion in the garage and made it seem that something could be amiss with NASCAR's rulebook verbiage. Or at the very least made it clear that Hendrick has figured out the way to successfully appeal a NASCAR penalty. How can the sanctioning body effectively punish rules violations if its points penalties are overturned?

It’s a question without a good answer at the moment, unlike the question of who has been the best team so far in 2023. The introduction of the new Cup car a season ago led to 19 different winners as teams figured out the best ways to build and adjust the cars. Now, with a whole offseason of development and research time, Chevrolet teams have won five of the season’s first seven races and the three Hendrick drivers who have participated in all seven races are all in the top six of the points standings.

"It's been really stressful trying to prep for an appeal and not knowing what the outcome is going to be," Gordon said. "We're certainly happy with what the appeals committee came to that conclusion, but at the same time we feel like we laid out enough information there that it shouldn't have ever happened, or even the monetary side of it and the crew chief side of it ... "

"I mean, once the green flag dropped, it's all about those teams execute and doing their job. But certainly quite a few smiles around campus this day. They've been down with what happened. So [the appeal ruling] definitely re-energized our folks this week and coming into this weekend's race."