Elk Grove Citizen
John Hull
The sophomore swoon or second-year jinx isn’t something exclusive to baseball. It happens in almost all sports, and this season it appears to be happening to Elk Grove NASCAR driver Kyle Larson.
After winning the Sunoco Rookie of the Year honors in 2014 on the Sprint Cup series, Larson hasn’t been able to match last year’s instant success.
Last season, Larson finished in the top five eight times and 17 times was in the top 10.
Larson has just one finish in the top five and five top 10’s in 2015.
And, he’s yet to win on the Sprint Cup circuit, something he did frequently in the minor leagues of stock car racing.
NASCAR’s playoffs, called The Chase, got underway earlier this month with the 400-mile race at Chicagoland Speedway in Illinois. Though Larson competed – and will continue to race in the remaining nine events on the 2015 schedule – he won’t be eligible to win NASCAR’s coveted Sprint Cup Championship.
Going into Chicagoland Larson was 19th in the points standings. Only the top 16 drivers are eligible to win the season title.
Perhaps his biggest fan is his father, Mike, a retired worker at SMUD who along with wife, Janet, still lives in Elk Grove.
Mike shared his insight as to why he thinks Kyle has struggled in his sophomore season.
“More than anything, NASCAR changed the package on the cars from last year to this year where they’ve got about 150-less horsepower,” Mike explained. “So, the driving of the car is different. The sprint car drivers like Kyle, Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, Kasey Kahne, the guys who are used to high-horsepower race cars because sprint cars are way more powerful than a Cup car. All of them have had kind of down years. They can deal with the horsepower, a car that is slipping and sliding and almost out of control, they can handle that than the guys who are more stock car oriented.
“I told my wife when (NASCAR) announced this, ‘I don’t think that’s going to work to Kyle’s favor,’” he added. “That, to me, is the biggest key to what is going on.”
In talking with the elder Larson it’s easy to see where the 22-year-old Kyle gets his desire to excel on the racetrack.
“I went to the old Capital Raceway in West Sacramento to watch the sprint cars and that’s where I caught the bug,” Mike said.
He loves spending his weekends at the same Northern California dirt tracks where Kyle got his start driving open wheel sprint cars, midgets and go-karts when he was younger.
His love for racing certainly rubbed off on his son.
Mike was Kyle’s pit crew, car owner, mechanic and mentor through all those early years. His dad ingrained into Kyle the low-key demeanor he shows now in NASCAR after years of driving the open wheel cars around Northern California.
“When Kyle was younger and was winning all those go-kart races we had those discussions about don’t get all excited when you win and don’t get down when you lose,” the elder Larson recalled. “Racing is a humbling sport because there is only one winner. I would tell him, ‘Kyle, there are a lot of eyes on you and me and because of your success they want to see you have failure, they want to see you and I have meltdowns, and just like the pitcher in Game Seven of the World Series who gives up a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning and loses the game, everyone in that stadium is looking to him to have a meltdown. But, a guy like that has to do everything to hold it in. That’s what you and I have to do.’”
Talk to most people around NASCAR and they’ll tell you that Kyle has already earned the respect of his peers around the track mainly because of the way he’s carried himself in the limelight of big-time motorsports.
“He still doesn’t think of himself as something special,” Mike said. “He’s just an average person who happens to be good at something not very many people are good at.”
And, Kyle wasn’t a child or teenager that had a wild streak in him, according to Mike.
“He wasn’t a daredevil and wouldn’t do anything that would hurt him,” Larson said. “He wasn’t the kind of kid that would jump off the roof onto something. That was not him.
“But when it came to racing, it was like a light switch would come on when he’d buckle himself into that car. You could see the focus. Here was this person that is saying, ‘Here is why I am on this earth, to drive these race cars. This is what I do better than anything else.’ There were times I’d ask, ‘Where did he get this confidence to drive this racecar?’”
Now that Kyle has an agent, a nice contract driving for the Chip Ganassi Target Racing Team, Mike isn’t nearly as involved in his son’s racing career.
“I don’t get into that stuff with Kyle any more,” Mike said. “I don’t go down that path of what they need to do or what’s the problem? I just don’t bring it up. It’s a lot of pressure for him and I don’t want to add anything to it.”
Mike and Janet will be at Kyle’s Sprint Cup races in person about 12 times this season, about the same number of times they were in attendance last year. He says there are positives and negatives to following his son as he pursues his racing career.
“The travel itself isn’t that fun,” he chuckled. “The places where they run these races, they jack up the hotel prices, it’s a big traffic problem getting in and out of those places, so there’s drawbacks. Making a dozen (races per year) is enough.”
Conversely, there are also plenty of perks that come with being the father of one of NASCAR’s top drivers.
Larson says Kyle’s contract calls for him to fly to each race via a charter airplane and stay in a hotel room. However, Kyle often lets the driver of the team’s RV that goes to each NASCAR race to stay in the hotel room and Kyle and family stay in the RV that weekend.
Typically, those RVs are parked in the infield of the racetrack.
“It’s a great experience for the drivers because they bring their families and they stay at the track where there’s a playground for the kids,” he said. “My wife and I will be sitting in the coach and look outside and see Jeff Gordon walk by with his kids, Kyle Busch carrying his baby. It’s a very family-oriented situation.”
And, Mike loves being a grandfather. Kyle and girlfriend Kaitlyn Sweet have a nine-month-old son, Owen.
“Everyone says Owen and I are twins,” laughed Mike. “The one thing about it that is life-changing. When he was born Kyle was running at “The Chili Bowl” an indoor event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they run sprint cars, and there are so many people we know. Owen was only two or three weeks old at the time. People were calling me ‘Grandpa.’ It was like moving into a whole other generation. I felt like I gained twenty years overnight.”