Larson comes to the perfect track as he tries to escape Chase elimination

If the Chase standings remain the same after Sunday’s race at Dover, Kyle Larson will move on to the second round of the play-offs.

Right now, that’s a pretty big “if." Larson isn’t completely safe. He isn't even comfortably safe.

There’s a 20-point separation between the first 11 drivers on the Chase grid. Then there’s 12th-place Larson. Kurt Busch in 11th is 10 points ahead of the No. 42 team. Jamie McMurray, who is 13th in the standings, trails his Chip Ganassi Racing teammate by five points, as does Austin Dillon, who is tied with McMurray.

“It’s better to be 12th than 13th,” Larson said. “I’ve got a five-point lead on the next guys. I’ve just got to be smart, pay attention to where they are on the track and just points race, really. Then hopefully can transfer to the next round."

Finding speed

Larson has shown promise in the past, but this year represents a bigger step forward. Heading into the Chase, the CGR teams were as competitive as they were at this juncture in 2014. The main difference between now and then is that, in 2014, neither McMurray nor Larson was in the Chase. This year, Ganassi put both its teams in the playoff for the first time in the organization's history.

“I feel like we’ve been pretty solid with speed,” Larson said. “We’ve led a lot of practices, ran inside the top 10 in both races. At Chicago, we just had some bad luck there. With 10 to go, we had a right front tire come apart, so we ended up finishing a lap down in 18th. The results there didn’t look great, but we ran really good.”

Rebounding from Chicagoland

Larson fought back after starting at the rear of the field in Chicago when the team was forced to change his transmission prior to the race. By Lap 100, when green flag pit stops began, Larson was running solidly in the top 10. He was riding seventh when the tire blew and didn’t have time to recover.

The team entered New Hampshire 15th in the standings. Larson led all three practices, qualified sixth, finished 10th and put himself and his team back in the mix.

“At Loudon, to finish 10th, at a track where I’ve struggled, is good,” Larson said. “Just got to be solid through the rest of the Chase and hopefully transfer through some rounds.”

If the team executes as well as it did at New Hampshire, Larson should be able to survive the Monster Mile and move on to the Round of 12.

“Dover is a really intense race track,” Larson said. “It’s super aggressive, bumpy, easy to get caught up in some messes on the restarts. It’s probably the hardest race track we go to. Just have to be safe and hopefully have some good luck and avoid some trouble.”

Monster Mile has been good to Larson

Larson has excelled at Dover. With the exception of Chase Elliott, who finished third in his Dover debut in May, Larson’s average finish of 6.2 tops the tour. He’s completed every lap raced and has posted two top fives and four top 10s in five starts.

His second-place finish to Matt Kenseth in May was a career-best at the track. Larson’s near-win stoked his confidence entering this weekend.

“We always seem to run well at Dover, so that’s a positive,” Larson said. “I came close to winning earlier this year. There are probably things I could have done differently to get the win. Excited to go back. Hopefully, our race car has even more speed than we had earlier in the year and I can get a win and advance.”