Kyle Larson’s journey to the NASCAR Cup Series Championship also brings responsibility

It is notoriously difficult to see a truly great race car driver ever show us a lot of real, raw emotion. Not anger. We’ve all seen that plenty. Not celebratory joy. That’s what we see most, when the driver who has just pulled into Victory Lane finally shows us their face after it’s been hidden under a helmet for four hours. But by that time of revelation, they’ve typically already done all their real emoting when we couldn’t see them and what we get is the scripted, corporatized post-win photo and hat dance.

We never see tears. Ever. We might hear them, a quick choke of the throat caught over a racer’s radio transmission to their pit crew during the cooldown lap. But by the time that lap is done, the ice-in-their-veins drivers have long ago hit their temperament reset button and their once-wet eyes have completely dried.

Not being able to find a crack in that firewall of feeling has always been a bit maddening, particularly when it has come to Kyle Larson. But Sunday night at Phoenix Raceway, Larson, the just-crowned Cup Series champion, wept openly. Then he wept again. And again. In his car, caught on camera. On the pit lane during his live TV interview. In Victory Lane, amid celebrating the race win and the resulting championship. In the media center. During the late evening photo ops with the trophy.

“Just thinking about the journey and how tough of a road it’s been to get to this point for so long,” the 29-year-old explained when he was asked about what had produced so many repeated tears. “But especially the last year and a half.”

Larson has always been a master of the classic motorsports understated reaction. He has won hundreds of races across countless series and tracks, so once he started winning regularly in NASCAR’s Cup Series, the big leagues of American auto racing, he always stuck to the “act like you’ve been there” approach.

But where he has been over that past year and a half he keeps referring to, no racer has been before or since. A…