Kyle Larson dominated, Sunday, at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He led 181 of the 267 laps and swept the stages. The Pennzoil 400 was his race to lose. Even with Corey LaJoie’s spin with 34 laps to go, Larson fended off Ross Chastain to pull away from the field.
With 12 laps to go, however, Tyler Reddick ran faster laps and turned the race to the finish into a game of cat and mouse.
“I knew I was going to have to kind of catch him off guard with a late kind of block,” Larson said.
And he blocked multiple times.
Reddick, who ran the bottom line to reel Larson in, ran higher and higher to close the gap. Larson responded by hogging the middle line and blocking in a way that would get him black-flagged in the NTT IndyCar Series.
“Every time I sort of got close, I mean, we’re running just wide open enough in Turn 1 and 2, you can kind of defend pretty well,” Reddick said.
The closing laps showcased two generational talents trying to make the other flinch. With two to go, Reddick closed the gap into Turn 1. He expected Larson to hold the middle, while he slipped by underneath.
Larson didn’t fall for it, and Reddick’s car tightened up.
Even with a lap and a half left, he ran out of time. Just as he did in both stages, Reddick finished runner-up to Larson.
Both were evenly matched in the closing laps. So what more could he have done?
“I don’t know if there was anything that I really could’ve done to get around him,” he said. “He would have had to make a big mistake or had some traffic kind of knock his wind around.”
Nevertheless, compared to lackluster runs at both Daytona and Atlanta, his run at Las Vegas was a change of fortune that pole-vaulted him from 24th to 12th in points. Furthermore, if this was any indication, he’s a threat to win at any of the 1.5 mile tracks, this season.
“We had a really good Nasty Beast Toyota Camry,” he said. “Just stupid mistakes on pit road. Same shit, different year, right? Kind of frustrating. We’ll continue to work on it, but a good rebound for our team today.”
