With just five races remaining in the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series campaign, Kyle Larson, who finished seventh place in the regular-season points standings, finds himself leading the championship by a healthy 40-point margin after a stellar start to the post-season.
The driver of the No. 5 HendrickCars.com Chevrolet Camaro placed fifth in the Chase-opener at Darlington Raceway, and in the first half of the Chase, has only gotten better, recording four consecutive top-two results (at Gateway, Bristol, Kansas, and Las Vegas). That has, arguably, left the two-time and defending Cup Series champion as the favorite to hoist the Bill France Cup at Homestead in November.
Winning back-to-back NASCAR Cup Series titles is a rarity, but with two separate championship formats? Unheard of. Even with the Chase returning for the first time in more than a decade, this Kyle Larson narrative feels eerily familiar.
That’s because it is.
In the eight years from 2006 to 2013, Jimmie Johnson and the No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports team won six NASCAR Cup Series championships with a similar type of Chase format (a 10-race post-season with no eliminations and the driver who had the most points at season end winning the title).
Johnson and his long-time crew chief, Chad Knaus, didn’t just win these NASCAR Cup Series titles. The entire No. 48 team tended to come to life in the final 10 races of the season, winning races, maximizing points, and catapulting themselves into the limelight of the championship stage.
That is exactly what Kyle Larson and Cliff Daniels have managed to do to start the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series Chase, and it’s made the No. 5 HendrickCars.com Chevrolet Camaro seem superhuman after a human-like regular-season. It’s even led to Larson and Daniels being thought of as a modern-day Johnson and Knaus,
“Yeah, I mean, I think they’re two very similar people in how they approach success, work ethic and all of that,” Larson said in a media availability this weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. “I’m sure Cliff learned a lot from Chad working underneath him as an engineer for those years that he did with Jimmie [Johnson]. I’m sure a lot of his foundation was set then in on how he is. I’ve always heard of Cliff being an ultra-competitive leader even back to his kickball days, so I think it’s just been in him.”
“I think he enjoys the fact of being compared to Chad [Knaus],” he added. “I also enjoy that we’re both compared in the same sort of categories as Jimmie and Chad because they’re the greatest of this modern generation. When you can be in the same sentence as them, you feel like you’re doing something good.”
In fact, Larson is off to an incredibly hot start in the Chase that not even Jimmie Johnson, in his championship-winning prime, was able to pull off – becoming just the second driver in the history of NASCAR’s 10-race post-season (2004 to present) to finish top-five in each of the first five post-season events.
That’s left Larson with a leg-up on his fellow drivers in the NASCAR Cup Series Chase, with just five races to go at Charlotte, Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville, and Homestead. But don’t give the No. 5 team the championship just yet; there’s still lots of racing to go, and as we’ve seen in the O’Reilly and Truck Series, the points can swing dramatically with just one bad day.
