LDN - Sports

Larson can carry Team Ganassi to new heights

[March 28, 2017] By Jonathan Ingram, The

This year has the makings of a breakout season for Kyle Larson. But it could also be a defining season for his team owner, Chip Ganassi.

Larson's victory on Sunday at the Auto Club Speedway kept him firmly in the points lead for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup. His victory in Saturday's Xfinity Cup event further emphasized that the fourth-year Cup driver has arrived as a regular threat to win any time he gets in a car.

After all, Larson led the start of the final lap in the Daytona 500 before running out of gas and then finished second in the next three races. On Sunday, Larson literally swept the monkey off his back.

"We have been so good all year long, three seconds in a row," said the 24-year-old Larson. "I've been watching all the TV like, 'He doesn't know how to win.' But we knew how to win today, so that was good."

Ganassi, whose team co-owners are Felix Sabates and Rob Kauffman, has long since been known as a winner with a resume that includes four Indy 500 victories plus 11 championships in CART and the Indy Racing League. His team has won NASCAR's biggest races such as the Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400 and the all-star race in Charlotte.

Given Larson's hot start and the fact that teammate Jamie McMurray has been fast all season, Ganassi could be in line for a first championship in NASCAR.

A victory in NASCAR's premier championship would not only complete Ganassi's racing portfolio. It could also elevate him to the status of American motor racing's premier team owner, a role now maintained by Roger Penske, the man whose teams have won just about everything -- including a Cup championship in NASCAR.

In one respect, any comparison to Penske, who has won more Indy car titles and Indy 500s than Ganassi, is patently unfair. Penske, who recently turned 80, celebrated his team's 50th anniversary last year. Ganassi's tenure as an entrant since 1990 is roughly half of that.

Both men started as drivers before switching the emphasis to team ownership. And both men run teams in different series with different manufacturers under one umbrella. This year, for example, Ganassi is running Honda-powered Indy cars, Ford GTs in sports cars and Chevys in NASCAR.

But the two team owners started in different eras. That explains Penske's lone Formula 1 victory in 1976, when the world championship was far less expensive, and the fact Ganassi now has long-running success in the more accessible American sports car scene.

Penske owns five major road racing championships from the 1960s and 1970s, but after last summer Ganassi has one major prize that continues to elude Penske -- a victory in the Le Mans 24-hour.

There has been a long line of drivers who have come through Ganassi's door, but Larson is one of the few who have virtually started a major league career with him. He was signed by Ganassi and first ran in the Cup series with cars entered by Harry Scott, who helped Larson earn rookie of the year in the Xfinity Series in 2013.

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In his initial 2014 season with Ganassi, Larson scored his first NASCAR win at the Auto Club track by capturing the Xfinity Series race -- and he then finished second to Kyle Busch in the Cup race the following day.

Heralded as a budding superstar, in part because he had won the 4-Crown Nationals at the Eldora short track as a teenager, Larson slowed down in the Cup cars. He did not win his first Cup race until last season, somewhat muting expectations.

After Sunday's second career victory for Larson, Ganassi suggested that things are different now when a young driver enters the top rank of NASCAR than earlier generations that included Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Jimmie Johnson.

"I think today you have to look at these guys coming into the sport, you have to look in their totality," said Ganassi. "You have to look at their situation. You got to look at who the team is, who's working on the car, who's engineering the cars, who's doing the pit stops.

"It's not just the automatic come in and, you know, a hundred races later you're winning races on a regular basis. I just think it takes a little more education than that today."

The bottom line is that the driver Larson replaced, Juan Pablo Montoya, never won a race on an oval, and after McMurray's breakout season in 2010, when he won the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400, Ganassi's NASCAR program became a relatively weak link in his arsenal.

Judging from events on the track Sunday and Ganassi's comments, the team has been rebuilt around Larson, who appears ready to shoulder the burden. Larson describes himself as fortunate to have Ganassi cars underneath him.

"Our cars are by far as good as they've ever been, really good at every racetrack right now," he said. "In both series I feel like I have a shot to win every time I go to the race track. That's always a lot of fun. That's always something I've hoped for, to get to a point of that in my NASCAR career."

As for a championship, it's too early to talk about that. But Larson acknowledges that he now expects the Ganassi Chevy entries to be good everywhere.

"You know, in the past, I had race tracks where I knew I would be good at," Larson said. "But right now we're going to some tracks that aren't great for me, and running up front. It's a lot of fun to have that confidence in the race team, go to the racetrack, fight hard and run for wins."

In the long run, how good can Larson be? Ganassi says his young charger still has a lot of runway and that it's anybody's guess how much Larson can achieve.

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