Larson: Indy 500 is ‘on my bucket list’
Ganassi open to idea, says he won’t hinder young talent.
Kyle Larson finished second in a prestigious sprint car event in Iowa on Saturday, then made it back to Michigan International Speedway in time to win Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race.
So the question team owner Chip Ganassi faced in the news conference afterward wasn’t all that outlandish: Could the Indianapolis 500 be a possibility in the future?
“See what you do to me?” Ganassi said to Larson.
Larson’s plan for the weekend required some leeway from Ganassi, but the victory Sunday was all the validation Larson needed and may have earned him a little more latitude for the future.
It was the type of adventurous effort that can help a talented young driver build his fan base, and that’s something Ganassi seemed to understand.
He’s in position to help because Chip Ganassi Racing has cars on both the NASCAR and IndyCar circuits, and he publicly urged the sprint car fans to tune in for the NASCAR race Sunday.
“Indy 500 is definitely on my bucket list,” said Larson, 25, who has four career Cup victories, three of them at Michigan. “I don’t know if it is right now at this moment, but for sure some day I’d like to, and Chip knows that.”
That may mean trying to complete 1,100 miles in one day, because NASCAR’s CocaCola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway is usually scheduled in the evening after the Indianapolis 500.
Kurt Busch was the most recent driver to try both, in 2014, before engine failure ended his bid 400 miles into the Charlotte race.
Larson said he impressed on the team that his love for sprint car racing would not affect his main focus, which was Sunday’s race.
“I had concerns, and I was getting ready to take a lot of heat in the media for that if we didn’t have a good day,” Ganassi said Sunday.
“I just don’t want to do something that’s going to slow him down, you know? I think you run the risk of that when you have a talent like that, that wants to go drive other kinds of cars and things. I’ve never been a team owner to keep my drivers from driving other kinds of cars, and obviously — you know, you want to do the best you can for the guy all the time and do what you can do, and hopefully we can continue to do it.
“I don’t want to make any promises.”