Larson on losing to Johnson: "That's why he's a seven-time champion"

It’s become an all-too-familiar refrain for Larson, who is enjoying the best season of his young career.

This time, Larson said the responsibility for the late-race loss to Jimmie Johnson was on him.

Larson had a comfortable lead over Johnson when a caution was displayed with three of 400 laps remaining in Sunday’s AAA 400 at Dover (Del.) International Speedway.

Most of the lead-lap cars had already exhausted their supply of new tires so the top six cars remained on the track and elected not to pit as the race headed to overtime.

Final restart

Johnson, however, did a masterful job getting around Larson to take the lead on the restart and his victory was ensured when a multi-car wreck erupted after Johnson had already passed the overtime line.

“Jimmie did a good job on the restart, a lot better job than I did. That’s why he’s a seven-time champion,” Larson said of Johnson. “He has a ‘golden horseshoe’ somewhere and he’s really good at executing. I’ve just got to get better at that.

“I spun my tires pretty bad. I tried taking off not using a lot of throttle. I knew we were both going to spin pretty bad. I wasn’t getting good launches (on restarts) all day long.”

Martin Truex Jr. won the first two Stages but Larson led the most laps in the race (241) and seemed to have the most consistent car out front.

“We fought hard all race long. I felt like we were on defense the whole race,” said Larson, who has one win and five second-place finishes in 13 races this season. “Even though I led a lot of laps it felt like we were on defense a lot of the time – we’d be on two tires when everyone else was one four, or we took just two left-side tires.

“We needed to stay green at the end. I thought we were a lot better than Jimmie was at the time and then a lapped car in front of me blew a right-front (tire).”

Larson said he had prepared himself for the possibility of a late-race caution and had even slowed his pace in the final laps to save some of his tires.

“I knew we would stay out if we had a caution and it happened. I just didn’t execute,” he said. “It’s disappointing. I run second all the time, all the time.

“In a lot of them, I’m leading coming down late in the race. I’ve just got to get better on those restarts on old tires.”