FONTANA, Calif. — After the recent postrace fight between NASCAR drivers Kyle Busch and Joey Logano, fellow driver Kyle Larson — a slight, 24-year-old Californian — was asked if he could ever punch another racer in anger.
“Look how big I am,” Larson quipped. “I’m scared that I am the one that is going to get beat up.”
On Sunday, though, it was Larson who refused to back down during a spree of late-race restarts to win the Auto Club 400 in an overtime finish at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana.
The victory in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race gave Larson a sweep of the weekend in Fontana. He also won Saturday’s race in NASCAR’s second-level Xfinity Series.
Larson also was a prerace favorite Sunday because he put his No. 42 Chevrolet on the pole position and because he arrived in Southern California having finished second in the three prior races.
“I’ve been watching all the TV like, ‘He doesn’t know how to win,’ but we knew how to win today,” said Larson, who drives for the Chip Ganassi Racing team. “This is just amazing.”
Larson is in his fourth full year in NASCAR’s top-tier series, and the victory was his second Cup win. The first came last year at Michigan Speedway, another two-mile oval very similar to the Fontana track.
Former Cup champion Brad Keselowski overcame early damage to his No. 2 Ford to finish second, Clint Bowyer was third and Martin Truex Jr. — who appeared to have the only car to keep pace with Larson for much of the race — finished fourth.
“We were right there all day long,” said Truex, who won the Cup race at Las Vegas earlier this month in his No. 78 Toyota. “I really felt we and the (No.) 42 had everyone covered.”
Except that, as has happened frequently at Auto Club Speedway in recent years, a series of late-race incidents kept leaving open the question of who would reach Victory Lane.
A key moment came during a caution period with eight laps in the 200-lap race left when Larson’s crew chief, Chad Johnston, had Larson pit for fresh tires when Truex and two other leaders stayed on the speedway to gain track position.
“We didn’t take tires, everybody else did and we were at a big disadvantage those last couple restarts,” Truex said.
The new rubber enabled Larson to take back the lead on that restart and after Ricky Stenhouse spun out to bring out the last caution with four laps left, which set up the two-lap overtime finish after track officials cleaned up the Stenhouse debris.
When the final caution came out, “I was just trying to stay calm and focus on what was ahead of me,” said Larson, who overall led 110 laps Sunday.
Pitting for tires was “obviously the winning call so my hat’s off to Chad Johnston,” Ganassi said, adding that until then, “I thought that race was never going to be over.”
Indeed, the caution flags came out repeatedly in the final 20 laps after mostly incident-free racing that spread out the 39-car field through long green-flag stretches.
The race started raggedly for Keselowski, Kevin Harvick (who finished 13th) and some others, with sections of Keselowski’s car covered in black repair tape after suffering substantial damage.
Even though he fought his way back to finish second, “I don’t know if we had anything for Kyle,” said Keselowski, who won the Auto Club 400 two years ago.
Larson is a native of Elk Grove, Calif., with Japanese-American heritage, and his grandparents on his mother’s side were among the thousands of Japanese-Americans sent to an internment camp in Tule Lake, Calif., during World War II.
When he entered the NASCAR series, Larson already had been widely heralded by the likes of former NASCAR champions Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon as an exceptionally talented driver, based on his winning record racing midget cars, sprints and other open-wheel cars on paved and dirt tracks. But it’s taken time for Ganassi to improve the speed of the cars Larson drives, for Larson to learn the ways of stock-car racing’s premier circuit and for Larson and his crew to work better together.
“I think he started to mature in the series and learning what the cars will accept and what the cars won’t accept in terms of putting a weekend together,” Ganassi said. “I couldn’t be happier for him.”
Larson’s growing faith in himself and his team was evident with his recent string of second-place finishes, and Larson acknowledged, “I was very confident going into today’s race.”
And after winning both Fontana races this weekend? “Lots of fun to be Kyle Larson right now,” he said.
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