Kyle Larson turned in a solid top-five finish driving a backup car in Sunday’s Gander RV 400 at Pocono Raceway.
Larson crashed his primary mount in Saturday’s opening practice session. That forced him to a backup car and in the process a rear of the field starting position in Sunday’s race.
But the Chip Ganassi Racing driver worked his way to the front and at one point was as high as second place before final sliding back to a still impressive fifth place finish. But Larson was tryng for more in the final laps and nearly made contact with the wall.
“I didn’t hit the wall, but I got close,” he said. “ I knew I was going to be close to the wall, so I bailed out of the throttle to keep myself from hitting the wall and lost momentum. I felt bad, but it was better than ending up torn up like the last time I was aggressive on a restart. It was a good day. It was a lot better car than I thought I was going to have, so it just goes to show how good our team is right now and how good our cars are.
“Last week, I felt like we had one of the fastest cars and we didn’t get to show it. Today, I felt like we were one of the fastest cars. If I could just race a primary car, who knows what we could do. I just have to clean up a little bit of what I’m doing in practice and the races, and hopefully we can get a win.”
Larson now has four top-five finishes with three coming in the last four races.
“This just goes to show how good our cars are right now,” Larson said. “Any time you have a good run in a backup car, it’s satisfying. The past two weeks in a row I feel like we’ve had good speed in our backup cars, so I’ve been really happy with that. I don’t want to race backup cars, so I just have to stop crashing.”
