Kyle Larson spun from second place at Chicagoland, got collected in a multicar wreck at EchoPark, then survived a pit-road collision at North Wilkesboro to salvage a two-laps-down 15th. Three weeks, zero wins, and a driver who has two championship rings from the last five seasons watched the goose egg in his win column stretch to 45 races.
“I’m just mad at myself tonight,” Larson said after the North Wilkesboro finish, a rare crack in a driver who has spent most of 2026 refusing to call it a slump.
A Streak That Doesn’t Match the Résumé
Larson’s last Cup win came at Kansas Speedway in May 2025, his third of that season. He went on to clinch his second Hendrick Motorsports championship that November at Phoenix, finishing third in the winner-take-all finale. After that, nothing. Not at Daytona, not at his home track of Sonoma, not anywhere across a schedule that has taken the No. 5 Chevrolet to superspeedways, short tracks and road courses alike.
For a driver with 32 career Cup wins, two titles and a résumé that includes leading 2,581 laps in his 2021 championship run, a stat line that once trailed only Jeff Gordon’s 1995 season, the drought reads strangely. Larson pushed back on that read directly.
“I don’t feel bummed or sad or anything of that nature that we haven’t won in over a year now,” Larson said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “Sure, I want to be winning… but I’m not going to stress myself out about it either. I don’t really feel like we’re inside a slump at the moment.”
He has a case. Larson finished top five in five of six races before the recent rough patch, and each of his three bad finishes came with an explanation attached rather than a pattern of pure pace deficit. He led 23 laps at Chicagoland before spinning from the runner-up spot. His EchoPark run looked strong before a late multicar crash collected him. At North Wilkesboro, early pit-road contact forced him to fight through the field twice.
“I think we’re a fourth- to seventh-place car and just need to do our best to finish there,” Larson said. “And if you continue to run in that window, you’ll have some wins hopefully, opportunity for wins pop up. But yeah, I mean, we’re always working hard to get better.”
The Process Larson and Daniels Keep Choosing
Crew chief Cliff Daniels has built his season-long message around process over outcome, a stance he has repeated to Larson and to a rebuilt pit crew that includes four new team members: mechanic Mark Hudson and engineers Nathan Woodby, Ryan Bradley and Jarrett Schalch.
“I try really hard to look at evaluating our process and how does our weekly flow go, and how does our at-track execution through practice and through qualifying and getting race changes done on Sunday,” Daniels told NASCAR.com. “We have improved a lot as a team just in what that is. So a lot of confidence comes with that. Even if our outcomes aren’t where we want, we’re getting more and more confident just in our process.”
Daniels doesn’t shy from the fact that Hendrick as an organization has managed just two wins through 21 races this season, both from Chase Elliott’s No. 9 team. For an operation with 15 championships and 322 career victories, that number is jarring.
“I think it’s important to talk about because Hendrick hasn’t had much of a winning season this year that we are typically accustomed to having, and so the conversations we’ve been having internally is a great look in the mirror,” Daniels said. “It’s a great reminder of just how, if you feel like you’re a percent or two off in a couple areas, this sport is tough.”
Team owner Rick Hendrick has been part of those conversations too. “Mr. Hendrick came to us this week and just reminded us of the process of continuous improvement, and it is OK to be reminded when you aren’t great of digging in, finding the things to make yourself better,” Daniels said. “Know that there’s going to be a little bit of a runway to go achieve that, just from a timing standpoint.”
Hendrick’s Strange Summer
Outside the shop, the theories are less patient. Former Cup champion Kevin Harvick has pointed to an aerodynamic balance problem tied to Chevrolet’s redesigned Camaro ZL1 body, introduced for 2026 with a reworked grille and more aggressive rocker panels meant to improve front-end downforce.
“If you get that aero balance off and you can’t get the front end to work, then it’s just such a hard balance to figure out in order to get the car to where it needs to go from a handling standpoint to be balanced aero-wise with the front end still where it needs to be mechanically,” Harvick said on his Happy Hour podcast. “And they have not consistently figured it out.”
Harvick’s broader argument centers on a pattern he sees repeating: Hendrick comes out fast in the spring, then loses ground as rival teams chase down small setup gains through the summer months. Larson has acknowledged the same seasonal dip in years past, saying the summer swing has “been a struggle” for the No. 5 team before. Elliott has been the exception this year, grinding out sixth- and seventh-place finishes even on off weekends, while Larson and teammate William Byron have swung harder between strong runs and disappointing ones.
Meanwhile, the teams filling the gap are the ones Hendrick used to leave behind. Shane van Gisbergen has turned Trackhouse Racing into a weekly threat across track types. Spire Motorsports, with Carson Hocevar and Daniel Suárez, has gone from afterthought to a team that shows up near the front and occasionally steals a win outright.
Larson isn’t the only Hendrick driver feeling the squeeze. William Byron has swung between flashes of speed and finishes that don’t match it, part of the same pattern Harvick describes: when the car isn’t perfectly balanced, the whole weekend can fall apart fast rather than settle for a quietly solid result. Elliott, by contrast, has become the team’s floor. Even his rough weekends tend to land in the top 10, a consistency Larson and Byron haven’t matched this year even with both carrying more raw speed on their best days.
What Iowa and the Chase Still Offer
Larson heads to Sunday’s Iowa Corn 350 with five regular-season races left before the Chase field locks in. He is not fighting for a playoff spot. Two championships and a place among the sport’s most consistent performers over the last half-decade have made the postseason cutoff a formality for the No. 5 team most years. What is at stake now is momentum, and the psychological toll of carrying a career-long drought into a format built entirely around winning in October and November.
History complicates things further. Larson’s average finish at Iowa across two prior appearances sits at 31st, by far his worst number at any track on the current schedule. It is not a venue that has offered him answers before.
Still, nothing in Larson’s public comments suggests panic, and nothing in Daniels’ suggests the team is searching for a scapegoat. The message from both sides has stayed consistent all summer: the speed is mostly there, the execution is improving, and the win will come when the small mistakes stop compounding.
“There’s a lot of strength that we’ve been building over the summer,” Daniels said. “Sometimes you have to go through difficulty and you have to go through those challenges just to know how to update your process and how to have the experience of when things don’t go well. Unfortunately, that’s just part of life. That’s part of competition.”
There is also a version of this story where the streak simply ends this weekend and the entire conversation evaporates. NASCAR careers are full of stretches that look alarming in the moment and forgettable a month later once a car finds Victory Lane again. Larson has been here before in smaller ways, and Daniels has steered teams through worse. What makes this stretch different is the contrast: a driver with two championships and 32 career wins measured against a number, 45 races, that keeps climbing every Sunday it doesn’t reset to zero.
For a driver who has rarely gone this long without a trip to Victory Lane, that patience is being tested in real time, one 15th-place finish at a time.
