Kyle Larson acknowledged that the contact portion of his race-winning move on Ryan Timms in Monday’s Front Row Challenge at Southern Iowa Speedway — a slide job launched, in basketball parlance, from well beyond the 3-point line — was the product of a mistake.
“You’re never going in there to make contact with somebody on a half-mile,” the 34-year-old Larson said well after the checkers.
Timms, meanwhile, later admitted he understood why Larson pulled the trigger on such a bold and ultimately controversial move, one that knocked down his nose wing and ultimately derailed his bid for victory.
“Any shot you do have at sliding a guy, you do have to take it,” Timms said an hour after processing Monday’s tough defeat.
That understanding from both, however, didn’t exactly lead to pardons on either side. Timms wasn’t ready to simply brush off the move, while Larson wasn’t particularly apologetic for making it.
Tensions culminated in a brief but telling exchange in victory lane and some colorful postrace remarks from both sides, though they certainly waned by the time everyone packed up for the night.
“I’ll remember that,” Timms said he told Larson in victory lane, referring to the race-winning slider that knocked down his nose wing.
Larson’s response, according to Timms: “I remember your Midget résumé.”
“Those had nothing to do with you,” Timms fired back, subtly throwing up his hands at Larson, who was referring to Timms’ prior run-ins during his Midget days.
Larson dragged that point — Timms’ clashes primarily from his full-time Midget seasons in 2023 and ’24 — into his victory lane interview.
“He was getting nervous in one and two and started making mistakes and allowing me to get runs,” Larson said. “It was strung out. You got to get going. I’m sure that wasn’t the cleanest move.”
The punchline from Larson: “If anyone has followed his career, we’ve seen him make a lot of mistakes as well.”
Timms, on the other hand, was considerably more blunt, flat-out calling Larson “a piece of s---” in his initial postrace remarks. He later walked back those words, texting FloRacing early Tuesday morning that “after I had some time to think about it I want to say that I shouldn’t have said what I did in the interview.”
“Kyle’s a great racer and I know that wasn’t his intention going into the corner,” Timms added. “I was heated in the moment that I lost the race and took it out on him and acted unprofessional.”
Although Timms retracted the vulgarity of his initial comments, his frustration with the move itself hadn’t changed much. He didn’t see a replay until more than an hour after the checkers, after most of his interviews had run their course.
“He went in there and I’d seen him coming up, and I mean maybe initially, anytime you get slid, maybe for like a second, you gauge it if you can drive around it,” Timms said. “I realized I couldn’t drive around it. I got completely out of the gas, slammed on the brakes as hard as I could, and still got hit.
“I just don’t think there was any chance no matter what I did — no matter what would’ve happened, I don’t think there was any chance of him clearing. It’s unfortunate, but it’s part of racing.”
Perhaps adding to Timms’ frustration was that Larson appeared to have the race car to beat without needing such an aggressive move.
After starting 11th, Larson had been a distant 9.1 seconds behind Timms on lap six. By the time he moved into fourth shortly before the lap-13 caution for second-running Carson Macedo, the gap was down to 3.9 seconds. Larson had erased more than five seconds of Timms’ advantage in roughly six laps — and believed he might have erased the rest had the race stayed green.
Larson didn’t want the lap-15 caution for Cale Thomas or the lap-18 stoppage for Parker Price-Miller, either. As quickly as he’d been closing on the leaders under green, he liked what he had working in traffic.
“I went from not seeing them to seeing them grow in front of me pretty quickly,” Larson said of the leaders. “I actually didn’t want the cautions at all. I felt like I had some momentum and lanes working where I was gonna be able to carve my way through traffic and get to them in probably the next six laps or so.
“But, I mean, you don’t know. That’s just how I felt with how my car was feeling in traffic and what I had going on.”
What Larson also didn’t know once he finally reached Timms was exactly how much time he had left to make the winning pass. Though he pulled the trigger on lap 21 with five laps remaining, in Larson’s mind the white flag could have been imminent.
“I knew we were coming down to the end,” Larson said. “I didn’t know when the white flag was coming. I didn’t know how many more opportunities I’d have.”
So when Larson saw one, he took it — cognizant that the slider would be tight into Southern Iowa’s narrow corners on a high-speed half-mile, but not expecting it to end in contact.
“I felt like it was going to be tight, no doubt,” Larson said. “But yeah, once you’re kind of committed, you’re committed. If I bail at all, I’m probably going to hit him in the left-rear, which is not good, too — or obviously a lot worse.
“Yeah, I mean, I wish I would’ve made the pass clean and not gotten into his front bumper, front nose wing. That’s unfortunate.”
It wasn’t as though Larson was attempting something he didn’t believe he could pull off. He’s made similarly ambitious sliders stick before, including a virtually identical move on Corey Day in last year’s Front Row Challenge without contact. That move propelled him to victory, too.
“I have made it a lot,” Larson said. “It just got tight tonight.”
For all Timms disagreed with Larson over whether the move ever had a chance of succeeding, he could at least understand the mentality behind attempting it.
“I’m very open-minded about these situations. I’ve done dirty things before,” Timms said. “I know it’s really not anyone’s intention — calling it like I see it. Any shot you do have at sliding a guy, you do have to take it. It’s hard to be extremely mad. In the moment for sure, as soon as I get out of the car, I’m upset.”
Larson, meanwhile, didn’t get too deep into the idea that Monday amounted to some sort of lesson for the 19-year-old. But his victory lane reference to Timms’ past wasn’t exactly a throwaway line, either. Timms himself has acknowledged that his Midget days included his share of run-ins.
“He’s young, but he has a lot of experience. He has been on both sides of it — a lot — throughout his career already at this point,” Larson said. “I think that’s why you’ve seen less of it lately. I think he’s learned through the experience.
“Yeah, he’s a super good driver, especially on big, flat half-miles. And his car is really fast, too. Yeah, I mean, when you’re running up front, things are going to happen sometimes. I’m glad I was on the winning side of it.”
When asked how Monday’s run-in compared to any others from his past, Timms didn’t give a direct answer — “it's frustrating because it's a prestigious race that you really want to win” — his head in the immediate aftermath perhaps still too cluttered to go there.
Timms and Larson are unlikely to race each other again this week, with their Knoxville Nationals prelims on separate nights and Larson’s NASCAR Cup Series commitments at Richmond Raceway on Saturday keeping him from the Nationals finale that same night. Barring weather postponing the Nationals to Sunday — and potentially putting Larson back into the equation — Monday could be their last on-track encounter for a good while.
Whenever that next encounter comes, though, Timms suggested he’ll remember how Monday unfolded.
“You race people how you get raced,” Timms said. “You know, race him hard. You race me hard, we’ll race each other hard. I mean, there really wasn’t a chance, I didn’t think.”
By then, however, the anger that provoked Timms’ initial reaction had largely subsided.
“I’ve cooled down,” Timms said. “You just forget about it. Sit on it tonight — just forget about it. That’s all you can do.”