Kyle Larson, No. 5 team’s second Cup title defined by loss, change and resilience

Column By: Zack Albert / NASCAR MEDIA – PHOENIX, AZ – Rick Hendrick made two admissions after Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series championship race. Both were telling.

The first was about the difficulty of keeping up with the breakneck pace of a frantic ending to the season finale at Phoenix Raceway, where title contenders rose and fell like fishing bobbers. The second admission was about how bleak things looked, even after Kyle Larson replaced William Byron as Hendrick Motorsports’ strongest championship threat to Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin in overtime.

“I almost jumped off the box,” Hendrick said. “I mean, I was ready to call Joe and say congratulations to Denny. All of a sudden, here we are, we’re going to win this thing.”

That call of congratulations ended up being unnecessary. Larson summoned just enough from his battle-tested No. 5 Chevrolet in a two-lap dash to the end, denying Byron and Joe Gibbs Racing contenders Hamlin and Chase Briscoe in a winner-take-all final.

“Never did I feel like I had it,” Larson said, sharing some of the same uncertainty as his team owner held.

The triumph that sealed Larson’s second Cup Series championship was a microcosm of the No. 5 team’s tribulation-filled season, one marked by loss, by change and by resilience. Each time, the group coalesced and forged ahead.

Sunday, the No. 5 team found that same style of perseverance, flipping the script on a pair of powerful performances by Hamlin and Byron, who combined to lead 260 of the 319 laps. All the while, Larson remained within striking distance, running among the top five through the first two stages.

In that second intermission, though, came the first setback. The No. 5 pit crew executed a four-tire stop, but the wheel fastener came free while tire-changer Jafar Hall tended to the left-front corner of the car. The miscue dropped Larson from fourth to 18th in the running order, forcing the team to regroup.

“It was ugly,” Hall told NASCAR.com. “I mean, after I lost the lug, the next thing I’m thinking is go to my belt fast to grab my spare, so that’s what I did. It didn’t turn out the way that I would like it, but we did the best that we could with it.”

The team had more extensive crisis management to make just 20 laps after the final stage went green. Larson had made up 10 of the spots that he’d lost when a flat right-front tire slowed the No. 5 Chevrolet in a cloud of smoke. As he had done at multiple points this season, crew chief Cliff Daniels calmly, coolly guided the team through the mishap, reassuring his crew that they weren’t out of it. The team waved around to return to the lead lap, but Larson restarted 29th with just 86 laps left in regulation.

“After we had the flat tire, there wasn’t a lot of good things coming our way at the time,” Daniels said, acknowledging what had been “a pretty ugly day” for the team overall. “We knew we would have more shots for pit stops and for restarts and maybe mix it up a bit. The way that the team stuck together and continued to believe in each other, Kyle continued to believe that if we just had a shot, we could close it out. That was what was put on display today.”

The hot conditions and the dramatic tire wear that came with it put all of Daniels’ leadership and strategy savvy to the test. A pair of two-tire calls in the late going were enough to give Larson the track position he needed, and only Hamlin’s No. 11 Toyota was within reach of the No. 5 at the end, restarting five spots back in overtime. The 33-year-old hotshoe did the rest, securing his second Cup Series title in a five-year span.

“Yeah, it’s insane,” Larson said with a smile in the media center post-race. “I don’t know. I mean, did anybody in here think that we had a shot? Like, I definitely — like Cliff was saying, we weren’t dead, but we were pretty close.”

The No. 5 team bore personal scars and the effects of significant changes throughout this championship season. The organization shifted up its pit crew in April, bringing in the No. 7 Spire Motorsports team’s over-the-wall bunch before the series’ first trip to Darlington. Just days later, the No. 5 team lost longtime public-relations manager Jon Edwards, a Hendrick Motorsports employee for nearly 30 years and a fixture in the Cup Series garage.

The loss didn’t end there, but the group pressed on through the 40-week season. There was symmetry with that journey, and on Sunday, it resonated with Daniels.

“A lot of our team guys have just been through a lot this year,” Daniels said. “We’ve had things going on away from the race track where we’ve had to overcome obstacles, sometimes even tragedy, and work through a lot of things together, which to me there’s just a lot of beauty in that, of a team banding together the way that we have this season. That was really showcased today.”

No. 5 jackman Eric Ludwig said he knew the feeling, especially after the team left the gates Sunday with a fast start, then “it was just, it can’t go right.” The season had that same sentiment, with much more magnitude on a personal level.

“This year has been a complete roller coaster,” Ludwig told NASCAR.com. “We’ve been all over the place, coming from the 7 as backups to filling in, to being on the car. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs this season as a group. Myself, my carrier, we both lost our moms this year. We lost Jon Edwards this year. So it’s been an emotional roller-coaster, to say the least, and I’m just glad that the man upstairs allowed us to perform our duties the way we’re supposed to today and just put us in the place to be able to do what we can to make it to this point.”

After going through all the hardship and adversity – both Sunday and all season – the No. 5 crew allowed some moments of levity to come through. The over-the-wall group sat on the edge of the championship stage during the post-race ceremonies, posing for pictures and swapping out hats before bottles of champagne were handed out.

That’s when Annie, the Hendrick family’s 11-month-old goldendoodle, wedged herself between Hall and Ludwig to get in the frame. Ludwig swings a heavy metal jack from one side of the car to the other on race days. After a hard-fought championship, he instead handled dog-sitting duties with some well-received head scratches for the miniature pup.

“I love dogs,” Ludwig said with a laugh. “I mean, she wanted to be a part of it, so Annie got somethin’ somethin’.”

There wasn’t much else the No. 5 team couldn’t handle, especially Larson, who gathered up his second championship in a far different manner than his first in 2021. That year, Larson won 10 times and led twice as many laps as in this year’s three-win campaign. That method and the mix of unlikelihood didn’t make the accomplishment any less sweet.

“It’s still so fresh that it’s honestly hard to believe that I’m sitting right here talking to you guys after what we went through tonight,” Larson said. “I think that’s probably what’s going to probably be the thing that I look back on, is just how unbelievable today was, the last 40 minutes of the race for us. Just incredible.”