By T.J. Buffenbarger
KNOXVILLE, IA (August 15, 2026) — In one of the craziest stories I have witnessed in my 30 years of covering motorsports, here are my takeaways from Kyle Larson flying from Richmond, Virgina after a NASCAR race to win the rain delayed 65th NOS Energy Drink Knoxville Nationals presented by Casey’s.
• If anyone questioned how passionate Kyle Larson is about sprint car racing everything that took place on Saturday night into Sunday morning should put that to rest.
Larson admitted that in the press conference once the weather forecast improved for the afternoon in Knoxville, Iowa, he was just hopefully the NASCAR race at Richmond would end in time for him to watch the A-Main afterwards.
Instead, his crew chief in the NASCAR Cup Series Cliff Daniels informed Larson about the lengthy rain delay and they were formulating a plan to get him to Iowa to run the finale after the Cup race.
That’s when the craziness truly started. From having Larson’s airplane being the most tracked aircraft in the world on flightradar24.com, to seeing him get off the plane thanks to a DIRTvision crew led by Dave Rieff and Brian Dunlap, to knowing what the end result was going to be when Larson stepped off the airplane calmly and put his bag into the waiting car with police escort.
Larson didn’t just win the race after that; he decimated the field leaving no doubt at any point that he was going to obliterate the field in route to his fourth Knoxville Nationals title.
The thing that continues to impress me about Larson and car owner/crew chief Paul Silva when compared to the other dominant combinations in our sport’s history like Steve and Karl Kinser, Danny Lasoski and Jimmy Carr, Donny Schatz and Ricky Warner, and Doug Wofgang with Davey Brown is Larson doesn’t race sprint cars full time.
Larson being able not only to get up to speed, but dominant in a sport against people that do it three times as often as he does is astonishing.
Nobody would have blamed Larson if he chilled out in his motorhome and watched the finale on television. The effort he put in along with all the people at Hendrick Motorsports that made the trip back to Iowa possible shows that Larson loves sprint car racing as much or more than the most passionate people I’ve met over the years.
If you are a passionate fan you should appreciate that effort to compete at the sport’s highest level.
• Most of the time when people discuss the term, “fountain of youth” in regards to Kasey Kahen it’s in reference to how he never seems to age physically. Since filling in for Anthony Macri earlier this year Kahne has found a performance level in the sprint car that I was not sure he was capable of anymore.
The week of the Knoxville Nationals should silence doubters who wonder why Kahne bothers racing sprint cars still after taking so many big hits over the past several years while racing them.
Kahne seems to share a trait with Daryn Pittman and other middle-aged drivers that seem to perform better with a hit and miss schedule. Kahne admitted in the post-race press conference it was nice not being committed to anything in 2026 and being able to pick and choose his schedule as they went.
Whatever John Mooney got Kahne to feel in the race car while driving for Macri Motorsports has translated with Mikey Kempter with his own #4 entry this week in Iowa.
Hopefully this motivates Kahne to continue to compete in a pick and choose schedule for years to come.
• Much like Larson’s effort to get to Iowa on Saturday, we can’t doubt the effort the entire team at Knoxville Raceway for the effort they put in the get the Knoxville Nationals finale on Saturday night and early Sunday morning.
The weather forecast looked bleak the entire week, but with each challenge Jason Reed and his team found solutions each time the weather presented them with a problem.
From the cancellation on Friday due to a persistent drizzle, the Duncan family making sure the track was rolled in tight when it needed to withstand rain, and just the sheer work most of that staff pulled off with some working 18-20 hours or more the past day and a half needs to be recognized.
All of this was done to make sure race fans that made the effort to come to Knoxville got to see the finale on Saturday. It would have been easy for them to push the finale to Sunday with the amount of rain that fell on Saturday evening, but Reed’s management style that empowers talented people to make good decisions netted a result of not having to arrange to open the gates on Sunday, sending multitude of people trying to rearrange flights and travel to stay another day in Iowa.
I spoke to multiple promoters during the rain delay, and none of them envied the situation at Knoxville this weekend. None of them would have wanted to trade places at that moment to make some very difficult decisions. In the end it all worked out and we got to see one of the craziest sequences of events I have witnessed in any sporting event for a team to win a title.