Two tires or four? Four tires or two? One question, one moment, one irrevocable choice, a championship on the line. For Kyle Larson and crew chief Cliff Daniels, the question of how to proceed in the final seconds of the final race of the 2025 NASCAR Cup season would determine whether they would hoist a trophy, or spend the season’s final minutes mired in the pack, and the next few months mired in regret.
Daniels’ first instinct on the final pit stops was to take four tires, which would mean gaining speed on the field, but at the cost of track position. His engineers advised him to consider thinking bigger and bolder, to make, in Daniels’ words on Sunday night, “the call that we have to make to get ourselves up front and to give ourselves a shot.”
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So when a late-race caution with three laps remaining ripped near-certain victory — and a championship — right out of Denny Hamlin’s hands, Daniels and Larson communicated over the radio via the use of code words — no sense tipping off the competition over an open mic — and with that, set in motion the events that would win Larson his second championship and deal Hamlin, who’s infamously NASCAR’s winningest driver without a championship, the most heartbreaking loss of his career.
Larson assured Daniels he would wheel the hell out of a car on two changed tires. That was good enough for Daniels, who ordered the two-tire stop that would put Larson ahead of Hamlin. And from there, Larson sat in the car, anxious but happy — “happy that I got the caution, and then happy that we took two tires and were able to come out ahead of Denny,” he told Yahoo Sports on Monday. Hamlin had opted for four tires, which would have been more useful had he not been buried on the fifth row of the restart with only two laps remaining.
“I was able to get through (turns) 1 and 2 good and keep my momentum,” Larson said. “I was surprised that (Hamlin) wasn’t able to get a better first corner than he did, but he just got stuck three-wide on the bottom.”
Kyle Larson celebrates in victory lane after winning the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series championship. (Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
(Jared C. Tilton via Getty Images)
Larson’s spotter Tyler Monn kept one eye on Larson and another on Hamlin, letting Larson know that Hamlin was struggling in the pack behind him. “That gave me a little bit more ease as I got under the white flag (signaling one lap to go),” Larson said. “I just knew I needed to put together a couple more good corners and we would be the champion.”
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Monn’s voice grew more excited as the turns wound down, but Larson tried to stay focused on what was ahead. He imagined what the final turns would look like, what the cars around and ahead of him were going to do in the closing laps, preparing himself for every eventuality. It’s a level of awareness born of years of experience winning big races — and also losing them, too.
Since this race’s loser is getting as much, if not more, ink as the winner, it’s worth noting that Larson, now a two-time champion, has tremendous empathy for Hamlin’s ongoing, vain, painful struggle to win a Cup Series title.
“What Denny is going through, for me, would be the Chili Bowl,” Larson said. “It took me 13 years to finally win, and I had been so close. Blew up leading. Christopher Bell passed me on the last lap. Thirteen years at that time was half of my lifetime trying to win this race.”
And all the time, Larson was wrestling with an ever-growing sense of futility and frustration. “I would always have these demons,” he said. “You know, those stupid voices in your head saying, ‘You’re gonna screw up,’ or ‘A caution is going to come out and you’re going to lose.’”
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If there’s any solace that Hamlin can take in what’s surely the darkest race of his career, it’s this: Once Larson nabbed his first Chili Bowl, in 2020, he won a whole lot more — two more Chili Bowls, 26 NASCAR Cup Series races, plus those two NASCAR titles.
“I won a lot of races before the Chili Bowl,” he said. “But the first Chili Bowl I got, all these big wins started flooding in after. And I think it was just because mentally, I got over the hurdle of doubt that I had in my own mind.”
Maybe there’s a path out of the darkness for Hamlin there, maybe not. If nothing else, Larson acknowledges that NASCAR’s current one-race, winner-take-all format paid off huge for him while wishing for something a little more comprehensive.
“What this format presents is definitely some excitement and craziness, but a better format would at least have a larger sample size to crown a champion,” Larson said. “Obviously, we got extremely lucky yesterday, and Denny got extremely unlucky. Whether it’s 36 races or 10 or four or whatever the number may be, I think anything larger than one race would be a little bit more fair.”
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Fair or not, Larson’s name will go into the NASCAR record books as the 2025 champion. (He finished as the season-long points leader and had three wins, so it’s not like he vultured a championship.) NASCAR is likely to change the title format next year, but Larson has put himself in a position to challenge for any title, no matter what the format. He has both the experience and the confidence to make the kinds of split-second decisions that are the difference between a title and heartbreak.
“It’s just,” he said, “a shocking way to win the championship.”
