Kyle Larson's peak is highest in today's NASCAR; how does it stack up all-time?

Yahoo

19-05-2025

In the week leading up to the 2025 All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro, it was fitting that NASCAR's star of stars delivered a performance worthy of the title.
Not only did Kyle Larson win his third race of the season at Sunday's AdventHealth 400 in Kansas City, but he also barely gave the field a chance — starting on pole, sweeping both stages, and leading 221 of a possible 267 laps (82.8 percent). His reward: a 149.7 Driver Rating, just a fraction shy of the perfect 150.0 mark outlined in the official rating formula.
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(In football terms, Larson came up just short of a perfect 158.3 passer rating — a feat we see only once or twice per NFL season, if that often.)
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For Larson, it was his second near-perfect performance in the span of just four races, joining the 149.6 he posted at Bristol. And that was on the heels of a 149.7 at Bristol last fall and a literal 150.0 at the Charlotte Roval in the 2024 playoffs. At this point, it's clear: Larson is the one active driver who can roll into any track on any weekend and utterly destroy the field through the sheer force of perfection (or at least near-perfection).
So just how much more likely is Larson to unleash one of these super-dominant performances than a typical driver? Let's compare the frequency at which Larson has posted a Driver Rating within various ranges over his career to the overall Cup Series average since the stat became available in 2005:
As we can see, Larson posts an above-average Driver Rating far more often than the typical driver. (He's also much less likely to have a bad day than the average driver.) And while most of his competition hovers near the middle of the distribution — the 'Cup average' sweet spot is around a 70.0 rating — Larson's distribution skews heavily toward the extreme right tail of the chart.
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He's logged a rating of 140 or higher in 5.6 percent of his career races, making him 6.8 times more likely than the average driver to turn in that kind of dominant day. Narrow it further to ratings of 145 or higher, and Larson does that in 2.9 percent of his races — 6.9 times the Cup average.
KYLE LARSON: Driver page
That's still not exactly a routine occurrence, as it can sometimes seem when Larson is on one of these red-hot streaks. But it is as close to a common sight as this kind of thing can get — at least among current-era drivers.
If we go back to 2005, the earliest season when we have data on Driver Rating, Larson has the best frequency of 140+ rated races (5.6 percent), and only Jimmie Johnson (at 3.4 percent) was more likely to have a 145+ rating in any given race than Larson at 2.9 percent. Only Kevin Harvick — at 4.7 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively — was all that close to Larson and Johnson in those categories of dominance:
So if Johnson is Larson's only current-era peer, what about previous eras?
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We don't have Driver Ratings for seasons before 2005, but we do know what goes into the Driver Rating formula. Given that, we can use what data we do have for each pre-2005 race, plus a technique called Logistic Regression, to estimate the odds that a driver posted a rating of 140 or higher in any historical race since the modern era began in 1972. (Specifically, we'll use data points like whether or not a driver won the race, their share of laps led, their starting grid position and where they finished the race — all of which are strong predictors of Driver Rating for the years where we do have data.)
Suppose we apply this to all Cup Series races from 1972-2004. In that case, we find that only six drivers are estimated to have a higher share of races with a rating of 140+ than Larson's career 5.6 percent rate: Mark Donohue (16.6 percent), Cale Yarborough (14.5), David Pearson (12.2), Jeff Gordon (7.6), Bobby Allison (7.0) and Dale Earnhardt Sr. (6.4):
Donohue is a unique case, an early road-course ringer who only ran six modern-era Cup races. He won one of them — the 1973 season opener at Riverside — leading 72 percent of the laps and dominating the field. The logistic model gives him a 99.6 percent chance of posting a 140+ Driver Rating in that lone victory, which came just two years before Donohue tragically died following a crash in Formula 1.
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Beyond Donohue, the remaining five drivers on the list are a who's-who of NASCAR royalty — led by Cale Yarborough, with a staggering 14.5 percent estimated frequency of 140+ rated performances. (That's more than 2.5 times Larson's rate in modern cars.) Known for his utter dominance during the 1970s, Yarborough even had a couple of wins where he led every lap, so it's not implausible that he might have rattled off a near-perfect Driver Rating that often as well. It was a different sport back then — one where Yarborough once averaged a record-low finish of 4.5 over a full season, providing another verifiable benchmark of domination from the Hall of Fame legend.
With that in mind, it's a bit surprising to see Richard Petty fall below Larson on this list. The King's name is synonymous with dominating the NASCAR record book, but the model estimates a lower share of 140+ rated races than Larson. In part, that's because he led fewer laps per win on average (43.3 percent) than peers like Yarborough (54.8 percent), and in part it's because Petty's unusually long career — which stretched until age 54 in 1992 — likely diluted his peak stats as well.
Anyway, all of this helps add even more context to just how dominant Larson has been, particularly in recent seasons. He may not win the title every year, but when he's on, nobody buries the field quite like the driver of the No. 5 car. As we saw at Kansas, Larson can make a 267-lap race feel like a breezy Sunday drive. And while a few all-time legends may have reached similar heights more often in their primes, nobody in this current era has a higher ceiling — or hits it more often — than Larson does.