Kyle Larson came back from an early tire issue to finish second in Sunday’s South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Like a number of playoff drivers in Sunday’s opener Larson appeared he’d have trouble when a tire issue sent him to pit road early. Fortunately for Larson it could have been a whole lot worse and he was thankful of when it where it happened.
“I mean, that was bad luck, but it was also good luck at the same time that it happened off of the corner down the backstretch and not into Turn 3,” he said. “The tire didn’t come apart and tear the car up. I knew when we came back out and only lost a lap, it was going to work out pretty quickly, and it worked out, I mean, perfectly. We lost that lap, took the wave around, got back to the lead lap, went under caution like four laps later.
“So it sucked that we lost stage points there. I felt like I probably would have got eight or nine points that stage and then who knows about the next stage, maybe eight to ten more, maybe less. I lost out on a lot of points today because of the track position that we lost. So yeah, could have been a lot worse, that tire problem. But we did lose out on a lot of points there.”
Larson was back to the front and was able to navigate through the rest of the day’s challenges that took out many of his fellow playoff competitors. The race came down to an overtime restart that saw eventual race winner Brad Keselowski get the jump on the field to pull away for the win. Larson said there wasn’t much he could do.
But the Chip Ganassi Racing driver was thankful to come out of the playoff opener with a second place finish and is in good shape heading to Richmond next week.
“But we had a decent day,” he said. “I felt like with those stage points that we lost out on, there was probably guys that we ran better than that still gained more points than we did today. So that stinks, but we had a good finish, so that was nice.”
