By Jerry Jordan, Editor
HOMESTEAD, Fla. – Kyle Larson did not know he had won the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series championship as Stage 1 came to a close at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Larson finished fourth in the first stage of Sunday’s season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway and the caution for Chase Briscoe’s engine failure ended the stage on Lap 78. The stage points, the point he was guaranteed for finishing the race and the tiebreaker he held over Christopher Bell and Denny Hamlin settled the championship with 189 laps still to run, but nobody had told Larson the math had closed that fast.
“I thought I had to run third to get the points I needed,” Larson said. “I just wasn’t even thinking that I had clinched it at that point. I knew the 11 was eliminated. I’m like, I just need one more point. All of a sudden they came on. I don’t know, I was just not expecting it.”
Once team owner Rick Hendrick came over the radio and told him the title was his, Larson drove the rest of the afternoon with abandon.
“He said, you can ride the wall now. Oh, my gosh, I felt like I already have been, but I’ll try to find another gear here,” Larson said. “Was having too much fun there, racing too free, got into the wall a few too many times, too hard. Yeah, found the limit of the Next Gen car. Apparently you can get it flat from hitting the wall. I’ve never done that yet.”
The wall brushes and a pit road stack-up at the start of the final stage left him 12th at the finish. Ryan Blaney won the race itself, passing Tyler Reddick on Lap 266 of 267 and winning by 0.314 seconds.
For the first time in years, the championship was actually won across the final 10 races of the season and not a one-off race between only four contenders. Larson went winless through the 26-race regular season and entered the Chase as the seventh seed, then he won three times in the next six races and built the 67-point cushion he carried into Homestead.
“I would say I guess you could look at Talladega as being the race that we won it at,” Larson said. “Just listening to the competitors’ interviews and stuff, they were defeated after that. You could tell mentally they had almost given up. There’s still two races left. That was pivotal, for sure, I think, Talladega.”
Doing it under the returned Chase format, one year after winning the title in the one-race finale, settled something for him too.
“I always felt like we were a deserving champion last year,” Larson said. “Just to make it in the final four, any one of those four drivers are deserving. But we won the format as it was. To come back and to have a different format, then just go on the run that we did in the final 10, yeah, just crazy. I mean, I just don’t think you can argue a championship in this format. That makes it satisfying, too.”
Bell finished fourth in the race and second in the standings, 49 points behind Larson and he had no argument with the result either.
“He earned it. If you ask anyone in the crowd, anyone in the industry who the champion should have been, it’s him,” Bell said. “He did exactly what he needed to do. He clinched it in stage one. They were the best team throughout the 10 weeks. I don’t feel proud that I won second. I feel like I should have maintained second and we did that, so we checked the box.”
Hamlin led a race-high 87 laps and won the second stage but his charge at the win in the closing laps cost him as he got into the wall hard. He finished sixth and ended the season third in the standings, 56 points back – still without a championship.
“Just going for it there at the end cost us some spots. Got in the wall. Definitely wanted to try to win. That was a fun race,” Hamlin said. “We had a great year. Every way you can measure the year, it’s been really, really good. Congrats to the 5 team. They deserve everything, the spoils of victory.”
On pit road Hamlin had gone further than congratulations, comparing Larson to Jimmie Johnson and saying he could see him reaching seven championships.
“I mean, just an exceptional talent. He’s this generation’s Jimmie, right? I mean, I think that’s the only way you can kind of describe it,” Hamlin told a group of media members on pit road following the race. “When it comes to playoff time, they perform their best and that’s something that Jimmie used to do. Jimmie was a guy that could get tons of speed out of the car. Kyle’s the same way, you could argue even more speed. There’s a little bit more variance in the results because of how hard he pushes it, but he reaps the benefits because he gets lots of wins. That’s something that certainly, he’s going to be winning championships and races well beyond when I’m gone from here. But it’s been fun to really race against him and see how really he’s gotten better and matured over the last 10 years on the racetrack. I remember many, many years ago, I was studying some notes or something and he was saying, ‘What are you doing all that for? Just drive the car’ and whatever, and he moved over to Hendrick and I think they made him start doing that stuff, and then you see the results.”
“I mean, it seems feasible. Yeah, I mean, it seems feasible. You know, I think that you don’t know how long he’s going to go, and so I think that matters. But I mean, I think if he can get to five or six by 40, then he’s probably going to try to go all the way. So it’s certainly feasible. And they’re good enough to do it. He’s got, you know, one of the best teams in the garage and he’s probably one of the best drivers, if not the best.”
Told about it in the media center, Larson laughed it off.
“I’d have to win five in a row to feel like I have enough time probably, like Jimmie did,” Larson said. “Seven is a big number. These championships are extremely hard to come by. Right now I’m not thinking, definitely not thinking, about seven. I’m happy to have three. If I could get one more, I would be even happier.”
Three already puts him on one of the shortest lists in the sport. Larson is the 11th driver with three or more Cup Series championships and the first to win back-to-back titles since Johnson won five straight from 2006 through 2010. His three came in 2021, 2025 and 2026 and the first name he reached for was one of his childhood heroes. He is also the first driver since Jimmie Johnson did it in 2009 and 2010 to win back-to-back championships.
“For me, I mean, like Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon are the two guys I looked up to through growing up dirt racing and stuff,” Larson said. “To join Tony is such a cool feeling. I can’t really believe that I’m on a list with him in championships. Yeah, ultimately if I could join Jeff Gordon, that would be amazing also for a lot of the same reasons.”
“I just never saw myself as, like, a championship type of driver. I felt like I could win races and have big moments of capturing checkered flags. To piece it together to win championships, I just never thought that was in my kind of capabilities,” Larson said. “Now, fast-forwarding and having three in six years, it’s wild. It’s so much just due to everybody else. I think I’m just a puzzle piece to the success. So yeah, I truly believe if I wasn’t with Cliff Daniels, I wouldn’t have a single championship.”