Hendrick ace Kyle Larson breaks down the art of passing in all three NASCAR series

Kyle Larson has already attempted the grueling NASCAR weekend sweep twice this season, contesting in Cup, Xfinity and Trucks within 48 hours. Though he fell short on both attempts, the Hendrick Motorsports driver broke down the subtle and significant differences in navigating traffic across the three NASCAR series, on NASCAR's Stacking Pennies podcast.

While Larson won the Cup and Xfinity race at Bristol this past weekend, his Truck Series run ended in heartbreak as he finished 0.934 seconds behind Chandler Smith. It was a similar case for the 2021 Cup champion, who had narrowly missed out on a similar sweep earlier this year at Homestead. The #5 Hendrick Motorsports driver lost the Xfinity race in overtime to Justin Allgaier after contact on the final lap.

Despite the missed milestone, the back-to-back attempts have been a learning curve for Kyle Larson into how different each series handles the lap traffic challenge. In conversation with Corey LaJoie and Ryan Flores on the Stacking Pennies podcast, he was asked which series presents the trickiest traffic to navigate. Larson singled out the lower-tier races for their unpredictability as he said:

"I feel like I was in an ARCA (Menards) race on a Friday night. Some of them guys that you catch, it is insane. I was behind (Matt) Crafton at one point and we ran up on somebody that was extremely slow. He hung a left and was two truck lengths in the infield, through the black pavement and slid back onto the racetrack. It was crazy. So, that's a bit sketchy."

The anecdote summed up how younger or less experienced drivers in ARCA and Trucks can often make lapping unpredictable and even dangerous. Kyle Larson then contrasted that with the intricacies of Cup Series racing, where the field is tightly bunched and margins for overtaking are razor-thin.

"The Cup race is just tough to lap people because the field is just that much tighter on speed, so it just takes longer. Xfinity, you can just work different lanes and get by people pretty easily. I feel like if there weren't stages, I would be able to lap the whole field there because of how much easier it is to pass. In Cup, I might catch 26th place or something, and it might take me 10 or 12 laps to get by them or more," he added.

That reality is starkly different from the Xfinity Series, where car disparity and varying experience levels offer more room to maneuver.

Larson narrowly missed out on Xfinity and Truck wins in both his triple-race weekends but stood strong in the Cup car, notching two wins each. The Hendrick Motorpsorts ace led a total of 688 laps through the weekend and reinforced his dominance on short tracks.

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"Xfinity is just a blast...Cup car is really fast-paced": Kyle Larson on how cars behave across series

Kyle Larson (5) wins the NASCAR Food City 500 at Bristol. Source: Imagn

Kyle Larson also dived into the feel of the cars themselves when asked about the differences between the NASCAR Cup Series and Xfinity Series. He explained that the Xfinity car offers greater fun and flexibility in traffic due to tire wear and surface changes, while the Cup car is less forgiving but more intense. He said via the aforementioned podcast (35:20 onwards):

"Yeah, Xfinity is just a blast there. The track gets super black, the difference in cars and equipment and drivers. So, there's lots of time dicing it up in traffic but the car side of it is really fun. And then, the Cup car is just really fast-paced the whole time like there's not much fall off."

In contrast, the Cup car runs at such a consistently high pace that tire fall-off barely factors in, making the racing more intense but less variable in strategy.

The HMS #5 driver noted that the lack of tire degradation in the Cup Series affects how drivers attack corners and defend positions. Across both weekends, Kyle Larson made the most of his seat time in all three series, even through the sweep eludes him.