Larson wins third straight at Michigan.
BROOKLYN, Mich. Kyle Larson slipped between cars on an overtime restart, capping his wild weekend with a victory in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway.
Larson was in the spotlight after team owner Chip Ganassi allowed him to go to Iowa to compete in the Knoxville Nationals on Saturday. He finished second at that premier sprintcar event before returning to Michigan and earning his third Cup victory of the season.
“With all the talk about Knoxville and going to Knoxville last night and not getting back here until 2:00 in the morning, I’m out on the end of the diving board there a lot of times,” Ganassi said. “So I appreciate when Kyle steps up and does what he did today; it makes it all worthwhile, obviously.”
Larson has won the last three Cup races at MIS, the first driver to do that since Bill Elliott, who swept 1985 and ’86.
He beat Martin Truex Jr. by 0.31 of a second as Truex’s teammate and Michigan native Erik Jones was third.
Truex was in the lead, about a second ahead of Jones, before a late caution came out because of a spin by Michael McDowell. That forced overtime.
Larson — who hadn’t led at all to that point — drove to the right of Jones on the restart and passed to the inside of Truex.
“I was running a few different options through my head under that red flag of what to do, and that one was one of them, and it played out exactly how I had hoped,” Larson said.
It was Larson’s fourth Cup victory and ended a mini-slump in which he had finished out of the top 20 in three straight races.