Former NASCAR champion Kyle Larson reflects on race, racing and redemption ahead of Pocono event

Kyle Larson, driver of the No. 5 Hendrickcars.com Chevrolet in NASCAR’s Cup series, has — of all things — commonality in common with his workplace for this weekend.

Pocono Raceway’s three turns are drawn from its neighbors and contemporaries: The 2½-mile track’s first turn is drawn from the Trenton Speedway, a kidney-shaped Central Jersey racecourse that houses the Grounds for Sculpture in its ruins. Turn 2, an almost-flat crook at the midpoint of the back straightaway, is a near-perfect replica of Turns 1 and 3 at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway. And Turn 3, flatter than the first but far more sweeping than the second, mimics the Milwaukee Mile.

Yet, Larson said, “It doesn’t feel that way at all.” Each track’s asphalt was mixed differently, and Pocono’s long, wide straights are as important to the circuit’s feel as its cover-band curves.

“It’s very much its own track,” said Larson, who’s raced at Milwaukee and Indianapolis.

The first half of Larson’s career — before a stunning incident on a pandemic-era livestream sent him on a wide redemption arc through, of all places, Philadelphia — was rife with comparison, too.

At the outset of his career, Larson, a California native, often was considered the latest in a long line of “next Jeff Gordons” — a label rubber-stamped onto virtually any precocious, clean-cut NASCAR star from outside the rural South. The marriage of his career at stock car racing’s top level to a seemingly endless calendar of short-track open-wheeled events placed him alongside Tony Stewart and Ray Hendrick, drivers who’d seemingly race anything with wheels anywhere with a track anytime they were available.

And when the first seven seasons in the NASCAR Cup Series produced only six wins, some in the motorsports press speculated that Larson was the second coming of Jimmy Spencer, “Mr. Excitement,” who was known for having spun a hurricane of highlights and memorable quotes but a mere two Cup victories in a decades-long career.

As he prepares for his 17th Cup race at Pocono on Sunday, however, Larson’s story has taken on a character of its own. He won the 2021 championship with 10 victories, a season tally only seen just four other times since NASCAR shrank its schedule in 1972. And he hasn’t gone winless since: His career total sits at 29.

Larson, 32, was just 20 when he began in Cup Series, too young for most top-level teams to be confident he’d succeed. And he remains grateful for the team that employed him during that first half, known at the time of his 2013 hiring as Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates.

“I had met with everybody in the sport, and nobody was willing to give me a chance,” he said. “But Chip [Ganassi, team owner] was.”

Yet Larson’s path to the top took a dramatic detour — right through the heart of Philadelphia.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly April 2020, Larson and a few friends were livestreaming an online race when he used a racial slur to refer to a fellow streamer, an utterance all the more astonishing for the fact that it wasn’t directed at a Black person or made with any apparent anger. Within days, many of Larson’s major sponsors severed ties with Ganassi, who in turn fired him, apropos of an indefinite suspension from NASCAR.

Few were more stunned than Anthony Martin, a businessman with deep ties in the sports world who founded the Urban Youth Racing School in Philadelphia alongside his wife, Michelle. They’d spent decades connecting young people of color to NASCAR personalities — including Larson.

Martin reached out and invited Larson to visit the UYRS’ facilities, an open hand that drew sharp criticisms behind closed doors from many of his friends and supporters.

Martin’s response was simple: “You don’t know him,” he recalled saying, over and over again. Larson had been a frequent partner of the UYRS since 2017, when he attended the academy’s end-of-year banquet.

Larson was seeking atonement — not simply with NASCAR, but with the diversifying fan base of a sport deeply grappling with its roots in the American South.

Rumors began to spread, few of them from Larson’s lips: He was volunteering with UYRS, which had offices near Delaware Avenue at the time. He was volunteering with service organizations in cities across the country, coming face-to-face with the consequences of racial injustice.

He’d visited the cemetery where George Floyd’s body was buried after his killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. Larson was fully masked, as was COVID-era custom, and wore sunglasses to shade his eyes, and, by all accounts, was unaware he’d be recognizable in the photos soon pinballing across the internet.

Larson reflected on his wilderness months in an essay posted to his website in October 2020 — one that mixed a heartfelt apology with detailed accounts of his attempts to make amends. But much of what he said and did during what he described as a search for “lessons learned” went unremarked upon.

“I told him, ‘This can’t be for [public relations],’” Martin said of their first few conversations. “It has to come from the heart.”

Chevrolet called Martin the morning after Larson’s slur, apologizing profusely and inadvertently breaking the news to UYRS. Soon, as dispatches from Larson’s exile landed him appearances alongside the Martins on a rapid-fire rostrum of TV and radio shows, Chevrolet and North Carolina automotive mogul Rick Hendrick were calling again, asking if Larson was fit to drive for one of the sport’s top teams.

The rest is history: NASCAR history, sports history, American history. And Larson has maintained his ties to the Martins and UYRS — even as he’s become one of the most successful racing drivers on the planet, even as rumblings out of Washington cast the future of diversity initiatives into doubt.

“We’re talking about a friend here,” Michelle Martin said. “A friend of the program.”

Even as Larson’s public profile has risen to new heights, the results of his time at UYRS remain largely invisible: The academy, which currently shares space with Harrisburg University’s engineering school on Spring Garden Street, now enjoys closer ties with Chevrolet, Hendrick Motorsports, and the team’s president — none other than Gordon himself.

Hendrick’s roster of drivers in the sport’s lower levels now includes another Black driver, Rajah K. Caruth. And the sport is reaching into new frontiers: Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson spends parts of the summers in a firesuit to celebrate a race NASCAR holds in the city’s streets, and NASCAR president Steve O’Donnell on Wednesday mused about building a track inside Franklin Field.

Still, Larson’s attention remains on winning.

“I love racing,” he said. “I love being with Hendrick Motorsports and running near the front, and that’s what I’m focused on.”