Kyle Larson Grinds Out Top-10 Finish At 'Probably Our Worst Track'

After a severely disappointing Indianapolis 500/Coca-Cola 600 attempt a week ago, Kyle Larson had potentially the worst track on the schedule for a bounce-back attempt in Nashville Superspeedway, where the California native has led zero laps since crushing the field by leading 264 laps en route to a win in NASCAR Cup Series event at the facility in 2021.

However, after a rough start to Sunday's Cracker Barrel 400, which saw him drop outside of the top-30 after an early-race incident with Zane Smith, the driver of the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet hung in there, and at the end of the day, he gutted out a solid eighth-place finish.

RESULTS: Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville

For Larson, the rough start to the weekend began with a subpar 28th-place qualifying run, which was compounded by the incident with Smith, which nearly ended his race before it really ever began. But the driver was able to leapfrog through the field with some excellent restarts, and in the final Stage, where the 1.33-mile concrete oval became a one-groove parade route, Larson was rewarded with a decent finish.

"Yeah, it was a long, tough race for sure," Larson said after climbing from his race car. "[We] just didn’t get off to the start we wanted, really, yesterday, and it carried over today. But yeah we had a lot of craziness happen, missed a few wrecks, almost wrecked myself a few different times and then just had some good restarts, and I was able to kind of get track position and it was just really hard to pass, so people couldn’t pass me and I couldn’t pass them in front of me. So yeah, happy with the fight but need to be better here, this is probably our worst track, I think."

While Larson has never finished outside of the top 10 in his five career starts at Nashville Superspeedway, the driver has elevated expectations of his No. 5 team at intermediate ovals. Since joining Hendrick Motorsports in 2021, Larson has captured 26 wins, 12 of which have come at Intermediate ovals.

So, while the 32-year-old racer is happy to come away from Sunday night's race with an eighth-place finish, he knows that there is plenty of room for improvement for himself personally, and for his race team at the concrete oval in Lebanon, TN.

Fortunately, Larson doesn't have to worry about Nashville Superspeedway for the remainder of the 2025 season.

"I mean the feeling is happy and proud, but at the same time bummed and hopefully we can get better at this track," Larson explained. "You know, typically at the intermediates we’re really good, but for whatever reason Nashville, since we’ve come here in the NextGen, has not really suited my style, I think, and we’ve just been searching for that balance that fits me. I would say every one of our Nashville races are about like that, where you start off really bad and then just kind of work our way forward through execution. So, need to be better here, but thankfully, we only come here once."

With William Byron, Larson's Hendrick Motorsports teammate and NASCAR Cup Series point leader, finishing fifth, Larson lost a little bit of ground in his quest for the regular-season championship. Larson heads into this weekend's FireKeepers Casino 400 at Michigan International Speedway 48 points behind Byron for the point lead with 12 races remaining before the start of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs.

However, with as bad as Larson feels like he's been at Nashville, he's equally as good at Michigan.

Larson captured three consecutive NASCAR Cup Series wins at the 2-mile oval in Brooklyn, MI while driving for Chip Ganassi Racing in 2016 and 2017, and he has three top-five finishes, and four top-10s in his last five races at the track. Last year, Larson exited the race at Michigan on Lap 116 after being swept up in a crash, but he had led 41 laps prior to his exit.

Expect Larson to return to his expected form near the front of the field this weekend.

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