Martin Truex Jr and William Byron dominated the regular season and led the playoff qualification. Joe Gibbs Racing, and Hendrick Motorsports, continued to have ascent after the commencement of the playoff season. But their championship contenders changed overnight.

In merely four races, Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson emerged as the strongest playoff prospects, until an unexpected chain of events brought Byron to the forefront again. Before the next playoff race, Hamlin spelled out a haunting premonition that tempted Larson‘s upcoming doom.

Denny Hamlin foretells crashes galore for Hendrick Motorsports’ champion driver

One did not need to be a motorsport expert to hold out hope for the #5 driver’s second playoff victory. Along with his supreme talent, the facts spoke for themselves. Among the current playoff racers, Kyle Larson registered the best average finish of 2.33 in the first round. Interestingly, the 2021 champion surpassed his average finish of 3 in his triumphant season.

Moreover, this performance stood at an all-time second-best after Greg Biffle produced an average finish of 1.67 in 2008. Larson towered over his contemporaries in every major indicator that could be considered:

• Raced laps in the Top 5 in playoffs? 804, the highest among his season’s contemporaries.
• Top 5 finishes in the entire season? The most over everyone else, at 13.
• His Texas victory was a probability, yet a top-5 finish was an unquestionable certainty.

After the second stage win and 95 laps led, the #5 driver lived up to popular estimates for the Texas Motor Speedway. Almost.

As far as the audience was concerned, Kyle Larson and #23 Bubba Wallace were the end game. Suddenly, Larson spun on the inside straight out of the race, and his #24 teammate took over to race past the finish line. But the #11 driver, hoping to compete with the skilled racer at the end, had a more theatrical observation. Hamlin claimed the incident’s direct connection with the caution after J. J. Yeley’s wreck. Denny Hamlin noted the #5 driver followed suit soon after the crash.

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In his podcast, Actions Detrimental, the JGR driver hypothesized, “That was a bad turn of events for Kyle for sure. You’re going from, kind of locking yourself into the round of 8, and now you got to battle for the next couple of weeks…I think Kyle’s an okay drafter but it seems like if there’s a wreck, he’s going to find his way in it in some sort. But it’s interesting, I don’t see him doing anything that’s out of the ordinary on superspeedways. It just seems like it always seems to find him. He doesn’t really start the wrecks. He’s right in the middle of it somehow.”

It was a momentous declaration by the Joe Gibbs Racing star. But how accurate was he?

A cautionary tale for Hendrick Motorsports’ Kyle Larson

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Denny Hamlin postulated Kyle Larson may not chronicle favorable outcomes on speedways in case wrecks erupted around him. This implicated Larson in two major ways. In the remaining playoff races, the next track in Talladega is a superspeedway. And three out of five other tracks are intermediate speedways akin to Texas. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that those challenging tracks would not incur a single collision in Larson’s vicinity. At best a conjecture, the #5 team should take Hamlin’s words with a pinch of salt.

It is indeed a cause for concern that Larson does not have a presentable track record in Talladega. In the past five races, the #5 driver has an average finish of 26.4 and marked a result of DNF in two of those. But in the Las Vegas Motor Speedway and the Phoenix Raceway, Larson registered an average finish of 9.8 in the previous six races and won in 2021. More notably, the #5 driver was a runner-up on the racetrack earlier this year.

The upcoming race at Homestead-Miami Speedway would mark a year since Kyle Larson swept the stages and dominated 199 out of 267 laps to victory. Despite the fact that he endured a collision with Martin Truex Jr.

The Geico 500 race in Talladega last year had a massive crash involving multiple drivers. Joey Logano went into the wall in Stage 2, taking several cars with him. Kyle Larson still went on to finish in the top 5 of that race. But in the worst-case scenario, one would assume for a moment that Larson’s performance is less than satisfactory in the YellaWood 500. Rick Hendrick would wish to remind Denny Hamlin of the Talledega race two years ago. Kyle Larson fished at the bottom of the barrel in that playoff race and still went on to win the championship. Thus, Denny Hamlin can rest assured that Kyle Larson would stand shoulder to shoulder with him in this championship battle.

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