Kyle Larson didn’t have to come to Knoxville to race a late model on Thursday night.
It was Night 1 of the Knoxville Late Model Nationals that stretch across three days, and he had a flight to catch in the morning to get to Bristol for the NASCAR Playoff Race.
The race paid $7,000 to the winner, and Larson’s third-place finish netted his team $3,000. The team, obviously, isn’t running for show-up points anywhere. There wasn’t a major need to have Larson come and race for the night.
Yet, Larson came to Knoxville. It was the latest example of something he’s shown over the past year and a half of his career. He just loves to race.
“That’s what makes him wake up in the morning – driving race cars,” Late Model team owner Kevin Rumley said. “He loves driving race cars. He loves driving different disciplines, and as you can see he does very good at it.
“For him this is like real life iRacing.”
The deal for Larson to race just the opening night at Knoxville came together when Larson asked Rumley what he would be doing following the Castrol FloRacing Night in America race that he ran early in the week.
Rumley was going to be at Knoxville anyways, and Larson wanted to run the car once more before he left, even if he wasn’t running for anything.
“I don’t know,” Larson said after 90 minutes of signing autographs for every fan in line at the track. “I just want to be competitive and win races. I never really thought I would be racing a late model so I honestly didn’t have any goals.”
When he sent his Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 Chevrolet through the final turn at Darlington two weeks ago, the announcers called it a video game move.
Going off that, the only way a kid could dream of reflecting on Larson’s career is by racing so many disciplines on a video game. Even then, you’d need three or four games to cover all of the cars that he’s jumped in over the past two years.
It’s a quality and trait in an driver that we’ve really only seen in Larson – a driver who works that hard and also has the amount of fun that he has putting in that work.
Sure, drivers past and present have done what he has done in their respective sports, but Larson has been able to stretch it across multiple cars on both asphalt and dirt.
It got him his late model ride.
“There was some rumors that he was going to go (racing) with Scott Bloomquist, but I don’t know if he wanted to do that because they were so far away geographically,” Rumley said. “So I met a mutual friend and (told him) that we have an R&D car that we’re building for Longhorn Chassis. It will be a No. 6.”
At that point in the summer, Larson had podiumed in 17 straight national tour races, won Indiana Midget Week & PA Speedweek, as well as his first Chili Bowl title in January.
It’s illustrated in this Walkapedia Results graphic:
Kyle Larson WINS the Bettenhausen 100!!
Yung Money is now up to 4️⃣2️⃣ victories through 83 dirt races this year. That’s a .506% winning percentage.
Since June, he’s won 37 of 64 (.578%)
He’s now two-for-two in @USACNation Silver Crown competition in 2020. pic.twitter.com/Ke0bWAma1D
— 𝙒𝘼𝙇𝙆𝘼𝙋𝙀𝘿𝙄𝘼 (@Walkapedia_) October 18, 2020
Larson had won, and dominated for that matter, in nearly every car imaginable. He wanted to try out a late model.
“I don’t honestly really remember or know exactly how (it came together),” Larson said. “I think just some mutual friends kind of told him that I was interested in racing a late model. He wasn’t really racing much at the time, and he decided to let me drive their car. It’s really cool and I’m very fortunate that it all worked out.”
Pretty soon there were pictures of a half-decaled, black-and-blue No. 6 car that Larson was testing for Rumley to see if he had a feel for the car.
It took all of a blink of an eye for Rumley to know that Larson had what it takes to drive the car.
“The first corner,” Rumley said. “Yeah. I knew we were going to be okay the first corner.”
Like everything else we saw him drive, Larson adapted right off the get go.
He won against the Lucas Oil Late Model Series in just his second career start on August 28, 2020 at Port Royal Speedway.
“The PDC was very impressive,” Rumley said, going through his thoughts internally about what he had seen his driver do in the last 13 months. “All-Tech was very impressive. Well, every race really. When the car is good, he gets 100% out of it. How he knows how to go in the grip and find the grip, its very impressive. How he plays defense and how he gets through lapped traffic… watching him do it, it’s beautiful.”
The ‘All-Tech’ race that Rumley was referring to was actually the season opener for the Lucas Oil Late Model tour. Larson won and for a brief amount of time held the points lead for the series.
Rumley even revealed that Larson wanted to run the usual orange spoiler that the series leader runs traditionally. Rumley didn’t think that would be right to do.
“Yeah, my only regret is that I wish we could have ran better at Eldora, but that’s behind us now,” Rumley said. “We’ll get better next time. Eldora is a tough place and our car is meant to be an R&D car. When we’re off, we don’t have anybody to go ask for their notebook.”
The car, when it was being built, was meant to be a development car for Longhorn Chassis – and if you’re not familiar with late model racing the chassis battle going on is more intense than say the manufacturer fight in NASCAR that’s been moving for years.
Who better to drive it than the guy that can win in everything?
Not coincidentally, there’s a full-time late model driver in Brandon Overton that won three of the four major events in the sport at Eldora this year. He’s racing a Longhorn.
“We stay about a year ahead and try to develop new things,” Rumley said. “We let Kyle set the schedule. We’re 45 minutes apart so I told him to treat it like it’s his team and he can run where he wants to. We’ll be there.”
The two have worked well together, taking the No. 6 to the podium nine times this season, including four wins and a massive W in the annual Prairie Dirt Classic at Fairbury American Legion Speedway.
With the driver talent that Larson has and the ownership stature that Rumley carries, it’s really a dream team that has formed in part of the dirt late model world.
“(Rumley is) super easy going,” Larson said. “He’s a really smart crew chief… just a great guy and a great team. I really lucked out being a part of it.”
And maybe the best part of the whole thing is that Larson approaches every race like he’s playing an iRacing simulation.
His has one goal in every race he’s in – no matter if it’s a dirt late model at Knoxville or a Chevrolet No. 5 in the NASCAR Playoff race at Bristol.
“I just go there and race and hope we get a win,” Larson said.
And he usually doesn’t have to hope too hard.
