Bob Pockrass
FOX Motorsports Insider
INDIANAPOLIS — Kyle Larson certainly didn’t have the intent of crashing during Indianapolis 500 testing, but hitting the wall Thursday did have a benefit in his view.
“You hate to tear up a really expensive car, but the same point, I’m happy that I got it out of the way and it didn’t feel too, too different than like hitting the wall in a similar fashion in NASCAR,” Larson said Thursday after exiting the Indianapolis Motor Speedway medical center.
“I know obviously there could be much bigger wrecks than that in Indy, but I’m happy that it didn’t feel way bad.”
The accident came in his first full lap getting up to speed during the Thursday morning session, which included extra boost in the engines that the teams would use for qualifying.
Larson, who had not been in an INDYCAR for about 11 months since the 2024 Indianapolis 500, said he was fine — he said he made sure to take his hands off the wheel.
“It just felt normal. I guess,” Larson said about the impact. “I’ve never hit the wall before in INDYCAR, so as I was knowing that I was going to hit the wall, I was like, ‘Man, all right, here we go. We’ll see if it feels way worse than hitting the wall in NASCAR.’
“But it felt very similar. But again, there’s way bigger crashes here than what that was. So I know it could hurt way more than what that was.”
Larson had admitted a day earlier that he felt a little rusty and then in the wreck, the car was tight, meaning the front end won’t turn and heads toward the wall.
Larson isn’t a driver who loves to run mock laps in a simulator, no matter the race car. And with the two days of testing this week and six days of practice next month at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he felt like getting back into an INDYCAR ride for the first time in 11 months without much prep would work just fine.
“Overall, I felt comfortable,” Larson said after running 102 laps Wednesday on the first day of the two-day test. “But [I’m] still a little rusty on things, small detail things, hitting buttons and trying to really get the dash setup to where it processes quick to my eyes and brain and little details like that.
“It was good to get all that out of the way.”
Some engine issues were a hiccup early for Larson, who will attempt to race 1,100 miles on May 25 — the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600. Last year, Larson finished 18th in the rain-delayed Indy 500 (a speeding penalty ruined a possible top-10 finish) and then arrived in Charlotte just as it started to rain and never got in the car before NASCAR ruled the race official.
That sour ending to a wonderful month has Larson motivated to complete the experience he never obtained a year ago. He entered the two-day open test more confident as he stepped into the Arrow McLaren car that has support from his NASCAR Hendrick Motorsports team.
“I just have a little less anxiety … of what to expect,” Larson said. “I still think there was definitely things I didn’t fully know. It is a little different car with the hybrid system, so there was things that I didn’t know.”
INDYCAR went to a hybrid engine in the middle of last season. Drivers push a button for boost from the hybrid and do it often throughout the race.
Larson didn’t think being in a simulator would have helped him with that.
“Maybe if I got in the sim, buttons and all that would have been a little bit easier to kind of set up the way I wanted, but you have enough time here that I don’t really feel like it’s that necessary,” Larson said. “The overall sim, car balance for oval staff, it doesn’t relate to real life. A lot of times you can just trick yourself in there. Even on the NASCAR side of things, I don’t really use the sim.”
He got his fill of learning the balance of his car in just one day of testing on Wednesday, as Larson spent about three hours in a relatively close pack of cars.
“For the month of May when you come here, everybody builds into bigger pack running and stuff, where today, it was like everybody was out there in a pack,” Larson said about how the open test this weekend would be different from when he returns in about three weeks.
“So you kind of got to get your mindset up to speed a little quicker than I guess I was expecting.”
Larson came to this test more confident, said his lead engineer, Mike Pawlowski.
“As far as comparison to last year, it’s night-and-day different,” Pawlowski said. “He’s much more comfortable in the car. He knows what we’re talking about in terms of the systems of the car.
“With the new changes to the car for this year with a hybrid, we had to learn that. We went through that into a learning curve for that. But he’s more than experienced with it now, so that’s good. We did a lot of homework today.”
In the second year of a planned two-year attempt at the double, Larson admitted he didn’t know if he would do it again, at least while he races in NASCAR full-time.
“In my head, yeah, I’m going into this thinking it’s at least for the time being, in the near future, the final Indy 500,” Larson said. “But I am still young, and … maybe someday when I’m not full-time Cup and I can really devote all my mind to Indy, I’d like to do it again.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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