Kyle Larson eyes another Brickyard 400 win as he returns to IMS hoping 'to do a much better job' than Indy 500

Indianapolis Star

25-07-2025

INDIANAPOLIS — Kyle Larson rolled into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at 2:45 a.m. Friday morning after a night of watching his kids rip around a dirt track in Oklahoma, and even then he could feel the magic of the Racing Capital of the World.
Larson's last 15 months spent at IMS have been a rollercoaster ride — the lows of a pair of attempts at the double either impacted by weather or a day-ending crash along with the highs of winning his first Brickyard 400 sandwiched in between. The Hendrick Motorsports driver enters Sunday's Crown Jewel race the defending race winner — the product of a little luck and a full head of steam racing through that final stint with no fuel save worries in the world as Larson worked his way from mid-pack to the lead as the final laps ticked away.
That experience — the way in which he won and the celebrations that ensued — don't leave him approaching this weekend as the defending Brickyard 400 race winner any different, he said, but the novelty of getting to arrive late last night as the last NASCAR winner on the IMS oval isn't lost on him, either.
'I'm just happy to be back, and hopefully our car is as good again,' Larson said. 'I think it should be as fast, if not better, than it was last year, so hopefully we have good practice and good qualifying and execute a good race on Sunday.'
Larson enters this weekend fresh off a result from NASCAR's most recent outing at Dover on Sunday that may not look like much in a vacuum — a fourth-place finish in a year in which Larson has won three times and finished in the top 3 six times — but it marked the No. 5 Chevrolet team's best result in two months – dating back to before Larson's second attempt at the Indianapolis 500 on Memorial Day weekend.
In the five previous races, Larson's crew had finished in the top 10 just once, including a pair of road course finishes at Mexico City and Sonoma outside the top 30 at the checkered flag. Similarly, he entered last year's Brickyard 400 with a run of five races with just a single top 5. 'That was good. Hopefully that's the beginning of things turning around for us,' Larson said of Dover, 'but we'll see.'
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Larson's latest trip to IMS comes on the heels of a crash-heavy Month of May at IMS that included accidents during the April open test, practice and his second Indy 500 — the latter coming on a day where the start of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing had already been delayed, meaning he was going to have to park his car before taking the checkered flag in order to be able to get to Charlotte on time for the Coca-Cola 600.
The experience eventually soured the 2021 NASCAR Cup series champion on attempting the double again before he steps away from racing full-time in Cup due to the extremely tight window between the two races the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend and the way in which a little patch of weather can throw a year or more's preparation from dozens of people off-kilter.
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But this weekend, it's clear those emotional scars, at least publicly, don't appear to have lingered as Larson attempts to go back-to-back, which the race's most recent winner prior to Larson, Kevin Harvick, did in 2019-20, before NASCAR's IMS weekend spent three years being held on the IMS road course.
'I always love when I drive in here at night and see the top of the Pagoda and the flags all lit up. It's really cool,' Larson said of his arrival early Friday morning. 'It's great to be back here in Indy, and hopefully back in a stock car I can do a much better job than I did in May.
'It's a privilege to get to run here and race at this facility, and I would love nothing more than to have a good run and hopefully put a bow on the double stuff with another Brickyard 400 win.'