Kyle Larson Added To His All-Star Race Legend

The multi-time All-Star winner was already one of the event's best. Then 2023 happened.

Kyle Larson had one heck of a weekend in North Carolina.

On Saturday, he drove the No. 7 truck to victory lane in the Craftsman Truck Series’ Tyson 250 — Larson’s third Trucks win in just 15 career starts. (His career winning percentage of 20% ranks fifth all-time among drivers with at least 15 races in the series, a nice bit of efficient Buschwhacking.) Then, on Sunday, he won his third career Cup Series All-Star race in his seventh try, making himself a cool $1 million in prize money along the way.

We already knew the 2021 Cup champ was one of the most gifted drivers on the planet. But Larson’s performance at North Wilkesboro Speedway on Sunday was out of this world. Runner-up Bubba Wallace — one of my favorite drivers, no matter what the haters say — had a good run, and in many ways built on what has been a very strong recent stretch of results for the No. 23 car. But Larson was so fast that Wallace didn’t have a prayer of catching him.

The 4.54-second margin of victory for Larson over everybody else in the field was not only the most lopsided in the history of the All-Star Race, but it was 58% wider than the second-widest gap in the event’s history — Davey Allison’s 2.87-second win over Ken Schrader in 1991. Larson won by such a dominant margin that the gap between his 2023 edge and Allison’s in 1991 (1.67 seconds) would itself rank sixth on the list of widest All-Star margins.

Now a three-time All-Star Race winner, Larson ranks fifth (behind Schrader, Allison, Joey Logano and Dale Earnhardt Sr.) in average finish among drivers with at least five All-Star appearances, and he is No. 1 in adjusted points per race at the event. One more victory, and he’ll match Jimmie Johnson’s record of four career All-Star titles.

But that’s for next year, potentially. This year, Larson can bask in just how well he and his dominant Hendrick Motorsports team have been running so far. With a couple of wins already and +430 odds to win the Cup Series title, the best of any driver according to Fanduel, Larson is driving the wheels off of any vehicle he gets into right now. And rarely was that on greater display than Sunday, when he almost literally lapped a field of stars en route to a very lucrative victory.

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Filed under: NASCAR