Kyle Larson didn’t have many peers during Sunday’s Pennzoil 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Larson led 181-of-267 laps en route to winning his second consecutive race at Las Vegas and 24th of his NASCAR Cup Series career. Simply put, it was a “dominant day” for Larson, as articulated by Denny Hamlin on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast on Monday.
“Just an absolute dominant day,” Hamlin said. “I think that Tyler Reddick’s pit troubles helped with that dominant day. I thought that those two were equal, well, I would say Kyle Larson was a little better in the short run, Tyler Reddick was definitely better in the long run. But it just kinda seemed like they merged together right at the end of stages or the race win, but a lot of that was aiding Kyle was that Tyler just had pit troubles and was losing spots and it would take him forever to get back up there. But I would have liked to see more laps of them dueling it out.
“Kyle was pretty much untouchable to the rest of us. Dominated the event. No mistakes in a race where there was a ton of mistakes.”
Tyler Reddick gives Kyle Larson a run for his money at Las Vegas
As Hamlin mentioned, Reddick was the only real competition to Larson at Las Vegas. Reddick finished behind Larson at the end of Stages 1 and 2, as well as at the end of the race as Reddick made a charge to the front within the last 15 laps. Reddick got as close as one car length with three laps remaining but couldn’t execute the pass to steal the win from Larson.
“I knew Tyler was going to be the guy to beat from the first stage,” Larson said after the race, via NASCAR.com. “He was really fast there. I was hoping those guys were going to get racing a little bit longer behind me because I felt like it was going to time out where he was running really hard and getting the tow to catch me at the end.
“Thankfully, [I] was able to air block him a couple laps and get him tight. I thought him and [23XI Racing teammate] Bubba [Wallace] were going to get working together again to build a run, so I was happy that didn’t happen. But all in all, such a great job by this Hendrick Cars Chevy team and just their execution, pit road, restarts — all that was great. Cool to get a win here at Vegas again. Back-to-back, swept all the stages again. Can’t ask for much more.”