Kyle Larson gained a race-winning advantage during second overtime restart of Sunday’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Brad Keselowski, running P1 at the time, ran out of fuel just before getting to the start-finish line. With Ryan Blaney, the P2 car, on the outside, Larson took Keselowski’s place on the inside on the restart.
Larson got by Blaney coming out of Turns 1 and 2 and took the white flag as the leader when NASCAR threw the caution for Ryan Preece’s spin on the back straightaway. Denny Hamlin covered the restart on Monday’s “ Actions Detrimental ” podcast and gave his take on whether he thought Larson jumped the restart. Hamlin said that because Larson had the advantage of being on the bottom, there was nothing Blaney was going to be able to do going into Turn 1.
“He went and gassed it up to get even with the 12 right away,” Hamlin said. “Then he backed off, then he rolled a little bit of speed. When I say a little bit, it’s like a mile per hour the entire time he just kept creeping, creeping, creeping and then they fired at the same time.
And then what happened was since they fired at the same time, Kyle’s got that one mile per hour advantage the whole time. “But again, this doesn’t matter at all. The 12 could have been all ahead of him entering Turn 1 and the 5 was gonna blow his doors off since he had the bottom.
It’s just one of the only racetracks we have where the bottom is significantly at an advantage. But yeah, the .
