After a dominant performance at Homestead-Miami Speedway in the NASCAR Cup Series, will Kyle Larson return to championship form in 2023?
Even with two wins in the regular season, 2022 had not been kind to Kyle Larson when compared to his 2021 excellence. Almost any season would be hard to stack up against a season with 10 wins and 2,581 laps led, but Larson has been shockingly absent from the front of the field for most of his title defense. After 33 races, he sat with just the two wins and less than 400 laps led.
With fellow teammate and champion Chase Elliott dominating the regular season, there were questions around whether or not Larson could recapture the speed and dominance of 2021 for the final 10 races.
It finally happened at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and it was an absolute rout. Larson was continuously reaching 10-second leads on long runs and held off Ross Chastain and AJ Allmendinger in the last 17 laps to finally win at Homestead — a track at which he had come oh so close in the past — for the first time in a Cup car. He led 199 of the 267 laps and had the fastest green-flag lap 109 times. The No. 5 was in its own zip code almost all day.
Even more impressive about the performance by Larson is that there hadn’t been a race this season where a Next Gen car was untouchable as he was in South Florida. In a year with considerable winning parity, it has also been a year of parity within races. In the first 33 races, a driver had led more the half the laps on only four occasions: William Byron at Martinsville Speedway in April (won), Elliott at Road America (second), Martin Truex Jr. at New Hampshire Motor Speedway (fourth) and Joey Logano at Richmond Raceway in August (sixth).
None of the four even reached 60% of the laps led while Larson was just a tad shy of leading more 75% of last Sunday. Even if it was just for one weekend, Larson, Cliff Daniels and the No. 5 team were able to put together a race that rivaled their most dominant performances of 2021.
Whether it was a championship hangover or struggling to adjust to the Next Gen car, it appears that Larson’s slumber is over. If the team can build on its Homestead performance in the offseason, look for the No. 5 to be dominant in 2023.
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