Kyle Larson loses right rear wheel under caution, held two laps after leading at Texas

It was going to take an incident like thi to keep Kyle Larson from leading every lap of this race. With how slippery and slick the Texas track is, there are plenty of caution flags to go around and likely time to at least get back on the lead lap.

If Larson is out of the way, it opens the door for Tyler Reddick and others to move to the front and control the race. The chaos of Texas will also give some drivers who are rarely up front an opportunity to makes moves and put themselves in great position by the end of this race.

Larson will have to hope he gets flags and hope that his car isn’t off kilter following that loose wheel.

Kyle Larson struggling in dirty air

So, it turns out, it didn’t take long to get back on the lead lap. The caution flags kept coming and restarts kept building up. Drivers were having a hard time in Turns 2 and 4. That also opened up the playbook for some of these crew chiefs as well.

Larson’s car is clearly not the same as it was. Things are just not clicking back in traffic. It could be due to the setup of the car. They were hoping to be up front most of the day and had a trimmed out, fast car on the pole. Or that wheel incident threw things off as far as the handling of the car.

Even back on the lead lap, Larson is having problems moving up. However, as he gets into the top-20, he may start to make strong moves and find enough clean air to get back into the top-10. If there are a few cautions at the end of this one, Larson might just shoot to the front again.

If Kyle Larson starts to sniff the top-5 late in this race, that’s bad news for the field. That No. 5 car is fast as a bat out of Hell and he is driving pi--ed off.