Larson says Talladega pace was “embarrassing at times”

Larson recovered from a tire blowout that sent him spinning on Lap 103, although his CGR crew managed to fix severe damage to the right-front fender.

The 26-year-old rebounded in the incident-packed closing stages to finish just outside the top 10, but remains down in 11^th place in the standings and 26 points away from the cut line to progress to the final eight.

Larson admits he’s now in a must-win situation in next weekend’s race at Kansas Speedway.

“We just had a terrible race car and were really slow all weekend,” said Larson. “So it’s pretty disappointing – embarrassing at times – especially in practice and qualifying.

“We were able to get an 11^th, so I mean, salvaged a decent day but we’re still in a position where we need to win next week. But 11^th doesn’t matter, even second wouldn’t matter, we just need to have a good weekend in Kansas, it’s always been a good track for us. That’s promising, to go to a track where we’ve ran well at, led a lot of laps and challenged for wins.

“Hopefully we’ll have a good race and do something special.”

Of his team’s superspeedway woes, Larson hit out: “You’d like to bury this [result] but at the same time, it’d be nice to invest some money into our superspeedway cars. Money and time.

“We focus so much on mile-and-a-half stuff, which is obviously important, but these plate races mean a lot, there’s a lot of points to be made at Daytona and Talladega, and I feel like we never really tried to improve as an organization really since I’ve been at CGR.”