By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
Kyle Larson finished seventh Saturday night at Richmond Raceway. So, the No. 42 team leaves Virginia with a good result.
How the day/night went, however, Larson is pinching himself over the fact he even scored a top 10.
The defending Richmond winner didn’t know where to place his car throughout the first two stages, serving a pit road penalty at the conclusion of stage 1 and overall struggling to adapt to the nighttime conditions this time around.
“I was never really strong the first run, I just had track position from a good start,” said Larson, who started the day fifth. “Our first run was probably our worst. We got back to being somewhat competitive from where we were running, just outside the top 10.”
From there, Larson fell off the lead lap on two occasions, with the latter taking place on pit road during the clean-and-green opening 350 laps.
That issue forced Larson to battle Ryan Newman and Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Jamie McMurray for the free-pass spot. And with 35 laps to go, McMurray hit the wall off Turn 2 and went after Larson as the caution was waving.
“I wasn’t very close to Jamie,” he said. “He got slammed in the fence, I don’t know what happened there. Honestly, when we went into Turn 1, Jamie hit the brakes so early, I thought he had blown a right front or something because he had a lot of smoke.
“I shot to the bottom and we made contact. He tried to cover it and I shot the gap. He was frustrated over the entire lap and he took it out on me.”
Larson believed it was down to frustration in the moment for his veteran teammate, who went on to finish 19th on the lead lap.
“Jamie was upset with me but I’m sure he’s just frustrated with that whole lap in general,” he said. “He was in the free-pass position and then got his car pretty much destroyed. I think he was just frustrated over the whole thing.”
With damage to both sides of his No. 42, Larson managed to still score the free pass and survived the wild racing in the final overtime restart to see the top 10.
“Somehow ended up with a seventh,” he said. “It was a pretty hectic restart at the end there. Amazingly, I didn’t touch one person and I was four-wide for a whole two laps.”