Larson breaks through, continues hot streak

When it came to discussing the potential of Kyle Larson, one theme tended to dominate before the 2017 season began.

Larson seemed full of promise, but couldn't master the art of closing out a victory when given the opportunity.

All has turned 180 degrees now, especially after what happened Sunday at Auto Club Speedway.

Larson not only led 110 laps, but found his way through the insanity of four late restarts and won the Auto Club 400. Not only was it Larson's second career win, but his fourth straight top-2 finish. 

Sure, he's only halfway to Kevin Harvick's mark of eight straight set just two years ago, but it's the way Larson raced for the whole weekend -- he won the XFINITY race, too -- that got everyone's attention. 

The driver of the No. 42 Target Chevy for Chip Ganassi Racing wasn't committed to riding along the wall at the wide 2-mile oval. Larson made the adjustments when he needed to and found a way to get back to the front after taking four tires during what turned to be the third of four cautions that happened over the final 22 laps.

Once Larson came down off the wall, it was all he needed to close the deal. The No. 42 got away cleanly on the race's final restart and rode the momentum all the way to Victory Lane, his first since Michigan -- a similar wide 2-mile track -- last August.

Larson has become the fifth different winner from the fifth different race team to earn a checkered flag so far this season. There's a shock behind Larson's win that doesn't have anything to do with him.

The engines for the Ganassi cars are supplied by Team Hendrick, the very same organization that has yet to reach Victory Lane.

Heck, Joe Gibbs Racing hasn't won, either.

How bad is it for NASCAR's two best race teams? Chase Elliott is the highest in the standings, tied for second in points with Brad Keselowski. Kasey Kahne is the next best Hendrick driver in 13th, Jimmie Johnson is 17th and Dale Earnhardt Jr. is 21st.

Among the Gibbs crew, Kyle Busch is 10th, Denny Hamlin is 12th, rookie Daniel Suarez is 19th (although he has back-to-back seventh-place runs the last two weeks) and Matt Kenseth is 25th.

That's not good, but it doesn't necessarily reflect a changing of the guard.

For Larson to push his run of top-2 finishes a little higher up the ladder, he'll have to look at Johnson in his rear-view as much as he can. Johnson has nine wins at Martinsville, but hasn't finished better than ninth (Phoenix) in the first five weeks.

It's all in good time at this point, but we're still in a state of flux where change will be happening radically up and down the standings. Larson has full control of things right now, but the season has only just begun.

Follow Tom Zulewski on Twitter @TommyZee81 or email tominator19@yahoo.com.

Johnson win caps crazy California weekend

When it came to racing on the wide 2-mile oval at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., it didn’t draw many rave reviews in the early years.
On a typically warm, sun-splashed day in Southern California, a native son made the most of a late opportunity and gave the fans in attendance another Sprint Cup race worth talking about.
Jimmie Johnson, who grew up down the road in El Cajon, got by Kevin Harvick on the final two-lap overtime restart to win the Auto Club 400 on March 20. Johnson became the first two-time winner of 2016 and moved past Dale Earnhardt into seventh place with his 77th career victory.
Johnson’s good fortune may not have happened if it weren’t for Kyle Busch’s No. 18 car blowing a tire to bring out the race’s sixth and final caution at lap 198, only two short of the scheduled distance. Harvick led 142 laps on the day, but Denny Hamlin won the race off pit road as the lead-lap cars came in to replace tires.
On the restart, Johnson momentarily fell behind Hamlin, but gave Harvick a push to the front before maneuvering to the inside of the No. 4 and pulling away for the win. It was Johnson’s sixth win at Auto Club in 22 starts at the track.
And it all came on a day when Johnson’s No. 48 Chevrolet was adorned with a Superman logo in honor of the upcoming “Batman vs. Superman” movie. Dale Earnhardt Jr., Johnson’s teammate at Hendrick Motorsports, drove the Batman car at Auto Club and finished 11th.
Johnson’s fire suit was emblazoned with the hallmark red “S” with yellow trim across the chest, but he felt like the whole team could have easily worn the distinction with just as much pride.
“Yeah, it's fun to have a paint-out like this on the race car,” Johnson said in his post-race interview. “We had the Madagascar 3 movie and won with it, had these goofy wigs that we wore.  Everybody was waiting for a chance to pull out a cape if we won here.
“All the wins are special, but when you have props and a cause like this, it takes it to the next level.”
Harvick, who was looking for his second straight win, lamented his ending misfortune.
"We weren’t very good on restarts for four or five laps, unless we were all by ourselves," said Harvick in a NASCAR Wire Service story. "The No. 48 was able to hang with us, and we just weren’t able to drive it in like I needed to, just didn’t have the front tires turning and the back wouldn’t grip.”
With Earnhardt now in the rear-view mirror on the wins list, Johnson knows the march up the ladder toward the likes of the now-retired Jeff Gordon with 93 victories, David Pearson’s 105 and Richard Petty’s untouchable 200 won’t be easy.
“There are no guarantees about when you're going to win and have success,” Johnson said. “I've been very, very fortunate to win 77 of these things, which blows my mind by itself.
“It's easy to look at trends and say we win X a year, but at some point that stops, that stops for everybody. I don't know when that point is for me.  I certainly hope it's not soon.”
Since he started his full-time Sprint Cup career in 2002, Johnson has won at least twice in every season – 15 years in a row and counting. As long as his health holds up and the racing is still fun, don’t be surprised if the debate heats up on not only if, but when Johnson – who doesn’t turn 41 until September – passes Gordon and joins Pearson and Petty in the century club.
The six-time champion picked up his 77th win in his 512th career start, an average of once every 6.6 times Johnson gets in the car. With success like that, only the foolish and cynical would have reason to doubt that he can take his true place among the greats of the sport when all is said and done.

Follow Tom Zulewski on Twitter @Tomzsports.

NEXT WEEK'S RACES

All series are off March 27 for Easter.

Martinsville Speedway (.526-mile short track oval), Martinsville, Va.

-SPRINT CUP: STP 500, April 3, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT, Fox Sports 1 (check local listings). Radio: SiriusXM Channel 90 or your local MRN affiliate.

Race distance: 500 laps, 263 miles.

2015 champion: Denny Hamlin.

-CAMPING WORLD TRUCK SERIES: Alpha Energy Solutions 250, April 2, 2:30 p.m. ET/11:30 a.m. PT, Fox Sports 1. Radio: SiriusXM Channel 90 or your local MRN affiliate.

Race distance: 250 laps, 131.5 miles.

2015 champion: Joey Logano

-XFINITY SERIES: Off until April 8 for the O'Reilly Auto Parts 300 at Texas Motor Speedway.

Harvick rules at PIR by mere inches

Kevin Harvick didn’t have the greatest of qualifying efforts at Phoenix International Raceway in the Good Sam 500 on March 13. Even with five wins in his previous six visits to the 1-mile oval, the task of coming to the front from the middle of the field was formidable.

For Harvick, the challenge turned out to be a piece of cake, even with having to survive a heart-wrenching finish.
Harvick led 139 of the 312 laps and outmaneuvered Carl Edwards at the finish line to win for the sixth time in the last eight races at Phoenix and become the fourth different race winner in the 2016 season.
And even though Harvick – who qualified 18th – and Edwards were two of only four drivers who led laps all day, the second photo-finish in the first four races of the season had everyone talking afterwards. It came courtesy of a two-lap shootout after Kasey Kahne wrecked at lap 308, four short of the finish.
Harvick got a jump off the restart, but Edwards got his No. 19 Toyota down to the low side of the track on the white-flag lap. Edwards gave Harvick a shove up the hill, but when the No. 4 car bumped back, it was enough to get the victory – by just one-hundredth of a second.
“Fun finish,” said Harvick, who won for the eighth time in his career at PIR. “I think as drivers and as a sport, that's really the benefit -- one of the benefits of the low downforce package and the tire situation.”
The driver of the Jimmy John’s Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing didn’t lead for the first time until lap 169, but he held on to it for all but six of the remaining circuits. When the last of the race’s five caution flags came out, it gave Edwards the chance he was looking for after finishing 18th at Las Vegas last week.
“Just a lot of fun,” Edwards said of the finish. “I really wish it would have worked out a little bit differently, but it's a good race. I ran into (Harvick) about as hard as I thought I could without wrecking him, and it ended up being a drag race.”
With the low-downforce package providing more than enough brain drains for crew chiefs and drivers alike, Harvick knows the process of figuring it all out hasn’t even begun to take shape with the season only four weeks old.
“It's a totally different mentality in practice right now,” Harvick said. “It's not about how fast you go, it's really about how long can you go fast and trying to get the falloff in the car to stay where it needs to be.”
On a warm, sunny afternoon in the desert, Harvick and the No. 4 crew got everything figured out just in time and just enough.
Among the 10 closest race finishes in NASCAR history, Harvick has now been involved in two of them. He beat Jeff Gordon by .006 to win at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 11, 2001.
Follow Tom Zulewski on Twitter @Tomzsports.

NEXT WEEK'S RACES

Auto Club Speedway (2-mile superspeedway), Fontana, California

-SPRINT CUP: Auto Club 400, Sunday, 3:30 p.m. ET/12:30 p.m. PT, Fox (check listings). Radio: SiriusXM Channel 90 or your local MRN affiliate.

Race distance: 400 miles, 200 laps

2015 champion: Brad Keselowski

-XFINITY SERIES: Treatmyclot.com 300, Saturday, 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT, Fox Sports 1. Radio: SiriusXM Channel 90 or your local MRN affiliate.

Race distance: 300 miles, 150 laps.

2015 champion: Kevin Harvick

-CAMPING WORLD TRUCK SERIES: Off until April 2 at Martinsville Speedway.

Side note: Other than Daytona, when he was basically told not to compete, Kyle Busch has been otherworldly in his dominance at Atlanta, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

He hasn't just won all three, but he's crushed the field and made them eat brake dust for dinner.

How good is the driver with 79 wins in 314 starts in NASCAR's No. 2 series? This good...

Out of 563 laps run in the last three weeks, Busch has led 493. That's 87.6 percent of the total.

Between Las Vegas and Phoenix, the ratio is 374 out of 400, or 93.5 percent.

In past posts here, I've argued how all the winning Busch has done in XFINITY and trucks hasn't meant squat without a Cup championship. Now that the Cup trophy is in the case, Busch is making the track his own personal playground.

While those who don't care for Busch are crying sour grapes, it's a tired, stale act. Instead of complaining about things like limiting how often Cup guys can run in the lower series, it's about time we appreciate what Busch is doing.

In order to be the best, you have to beat the best. Everyone in the XFINITY garage recognizes that. It's about time the fans do the same.

Another item I have to confess here: I had a three-way viewing/listening experience Sunday between the NCAA Tournament selection show on my computer, an additional Facebook tab, and the race from Phoenix on my SiriusXM app.

The early ratings showed NASCAR came within an eyelash of beating the selection show for viewing audience, 3.7 to 3.6. CBS tried to expand to two hours for the first time. It was a dull, lifeless experience.

Not so from the finish at Phoenix. The excitement came when it mattered, and it's continued a trend of great finishes through the first four weeks.

As long as the racing keeps going like it has been, interest in NASCAR will continue to grow in 2016. Maybe not back to the level it was at the turn of the millenium, but at least on an upward trend.