One of the pivotal moments in the Ally 400 on Sunday came during an overtime restart when Kyle Larson got into the back of Denny Hamlin but ultimately wound up shooting up the track instead and sideswiping Ross Chastain, taking Chastain out.
A growing beef between Larson and Hamlin was likely the culprit, as it certainly looked like Larson was trying to get Hamlin by any means possible.
Kevin Harvick isn’t a fan of how the No. 5 car handled things.
“I don’t even think that was the right place to wreck him. You can’t be bumper to bumper like that pushing him into the corner,” Harvick said on the Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast. “You’re not just going to push those tanks out of the way.
“I think in those scenarios — and I had this conversation with some of our younger drivers a couple weeks ago — I said, ‘Look, when you’re in a position to win the race, that’s not when you settle the score.’ I think you try to win the race first and settle the score later, because I still believe that Kyle Larson could have won that race if he would have raced like Kyle Larson. I think he was trying to force the issue on something that was not how he would have done it typically.”
There’s one very simple reason that Larson might have been best off avoiding initiating contact with Hamlin.
Hamlin was already in a decent battle with Chastain, and the two of them have had some beef in the recent past that might have led to some fireworks. Fireworks that could have benefited Kyle Larson.
“At that point Ross didn’t have the racecar that Denny Hamlin had, and Ross had done a great job of holding off Denny Hamlin as long as he did,” Harvick explained. “He had another chance to fire off in there and was probably going to be door to door and likely Kyle Larson could have just let that play out and drove around them both. I don’t know. It seems out of character for Kyle, and I think a lot of that comes from the guys around him that are putting the pressure on him to do something like that. I think naturally you can take care of a lot of that stuff without forcing the issue.”
Harvick thinks based on how the incident played out, right at the beginning of the overtime restart without much time for the race to breathe after Kyle Larson and Denny Hamlin were bunched together, Larson had to be feeling pressure from an outside source to get into Hamlin.
“I think with the Larson scenario here, I mean he was definitely trying to move the 11 out of the way, and it’s like you said earlier, he was trying to do something out of character, hit the apron and wound up wrecking the 1,” Harvick said. “That took the 1 out of the race, wrecked a few other cars, but that was really, instead of Kyle doing what Kyle does, he was kind of falling into the pressure of doing something out of character, and that was move Denny Hamlin or turn him sideways and push him out of the way instead of just pass him and do the things that he normally does to try to win the race. And it got somebody else in trouble.
“That’s the part that I think you learn along the way, and I think Kyle Larson will take a lesson from this and say, ‘You know what, I don’t need to listen to the guys around me in some of these situations,’ because the crew guys, they’ll put this unneeded pressure on you to do stuff like that and the fans will put this unneeded pressure on you to force you into doing something that’s out of character.”
Kyle Larson’s one of the top drivers in the field. He doesn’t need to extend himself outside his comfort zone to produce very positive results.
Harvick thinks that’ll be a learning curve for him.
“That’s just not the way Kyle Larson races,” he said. “He’s going to be aggressive. He’s going to put that car in places that it typically wouldn’t go because of the way that he drives, but when you try to start doing things like that and do them intentionally and try to do things that you normally don’t do, you get yourself in trouble. I think that’s just something you learn that comes from the pressure with the fans.”
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