It was only five years ago that Kyle Larson was the most polarizing name in NASCAR.
Throughout his six full seasons with Chip Ganassi Racing, there were two strong contingents surrounding Larson: those who viewed him as a future Cup Series champion on a better team, and those who saw him as too reckless for his own good. Then in 2020, he was suspended indefinitely for dropping a racial slur on an iRacing video game stream during the COVID-19 lockdown. He had all the talent in the world, and threw it away.
In a stunning plot twist, he signed with Hendrick Motorsports for the following season. All he did was have one of the most dominant campaigns of NASCAR's modern era, launching the prime of an all-time great career that's still far from over.
Kyle Larson is the face of his generation, and he's still at the top of his game
From the start, Larson was considered special. He was a once-in-a-generation raw talent who could do things with a race car nobody else on the track could. He built a reputation early in his career for his unique driving style, always running right next to the wall on high-banked intermediates and performing "slide jobs" like he was racing on dirt. It didn't always work, but boy, was he exciting.
Still, the question remained as to whether he could put it all together. That was answered in no time in 2021, when he joined Jimmie Johnson in 2007 as the only other driver to win 10 races in a season this century, and led the most laps (2,581) of anyone since Jeff Gordon in 1995 (2,610).
Life got a bit harder for Larson after that, due to the 2022 introduction of the Next Gen car and its spec parts, which have condensed the field in such a way that makes dominance harder to come by for anybody. Still, in the past four years, he's won the most races (16), scored the most top five finishes (58), and led the most laps by nearly 1,000 over the next closest driver.
In 2025, Larson's team didn't have the dominant speed it possessed in the previous four seasons, and yet he still found a way to put himself in position to pounce on chaos at the end of the year for his second Cup Series championship. We can argue all day about the validity of titles under NASCAR's playoff format, but he scored the most points over the full season too, for the third time in his career.
With 32 career wins and counting, Larson is already quickly climbing up the ranks of the all-time greats. That's despite spending only one of his 11 full seasons both on a team that was capable enough to dominate, and in a car that didn't promote manufactured parity.
Odds are, Larson still has at least another half-decade or so before he starts slipping from the top of his game. By the time it's all said and done, barring something unforeseen, he should be somewhere in the 50–60-win range and likely have at least one more title. But when you've already accomplished as much as he has, compiling accolades becomes far less important.
Larson is among the small handful of best drivers to ever race in NASCAR. All he has left to do to prove it is exactly what he's been doing for the past five years.