Hendrick Motorsports pulled the wraps off Kyle Larson’s paint scheme for Las Vegas this week, and it isn’t the neon HendrickCars.com green the No. 5 has worn all year. It’s yellow, blue and red, built around a Kellogg’s-and-CarQuest color block that hasn’t raced in nearly two decades. The car is a tribute to Kyle Busch, who died in May at 41 after what his family described as severe pneumonia that progressed into sepsis, and specifically to the No. 5 Chevrolet he drove for Hendrick before most fans ever knew him as a Toyota driver.
That distinction matters more than it looks. Busch spent 15 years and 56 of his 63 Cup wins at Joe Gibbs Racing, enough to bury the fact that his career actually started at Hendrick, in the same shop that fields Larson’s car today. Busch signed with Rick Hendrick in 2003 as a teenager, ran a six-race Cup audition in 2004, then took over the No. 5 full-time in 2005 alongside crew chief Alan Gustafson. He became the youngest winner in Cup history at the time by taking Auto Club Speedway in just his 31st start, and collected three more wins before Hendrick’s decision to sign Dale Earnhardt Jr. for 2008 pushed Busch out the door and into the ride that made him famous.
The specific scheme Larson will run traces back to March 25, 2007, when Busch drove that Kellogg’s/CarQuest Impala to victory at Bristol. It wasn’t just another short-track win. That race was the debut of NASCAR’s Car of Tomorrow, the Gen 5 chassis that ran from 2007 through 2012 and drew plenty of complaints from drivers about how it handled. Busch’s win in it also happened to be Chevrolet’s 600th in Cup Series history and the 61st for the Impala nameplate, details Hendrick’s own archive team dug up when they restored the actual car for Rick Hendrick’s personal collection.
Las Vegas adds another layer that has nothing to do with sponsorship logos. Busch was born and raised there, the son of a mechanic who moved the family from Illinois so his kids could race go-karts and Legends cars on the local bullring. Las Vegas Motor Speedway isn’t a random venue for Larson to carry the scheme, either. It’s where he won his first race in Hendrick equipment, back in March 2021, on his way to the first of his two championships. Two drivers, two different eras of the same No. 5 lineage, tied together by a track that mattered to one of them personally and to the other professionally.
None of that history changes what actually gets decided on Sunday. Las Vegas is the fifth of ten postseason races in a Chase format NASCAR rebuilt for 2026: points reseeded once after the regular season, no elimination rounds, no bracket, just a straight points race to Homestead with wins now worth 55 points instead of 40. That change was meant to punish drivers who coast for stage points, and right now it isn’t working out for Larson. He’s the reigning, two-time champion, he’s seventh in the standings, 49 markers behind Denny Hamlin, and he hasn’t won a single points race through 27 starts this season despite ten top fives. In a format built to reward victories, Larson is currently the best points racer in the field with nothing to actually cash in.
It’s a quieter storyline than the one Larson generated this summer when he needled Carson Hocevar over a pair of pre-race spins at New Hampshire, but it carries far more weight over the final stretch of the season. Busch closed his own career at Richard Childress Racing, the same shop currently rebuilding its lineup around names like Austin Hill for 2027, and went winless there for the better part of three seasons before his death. Larson’s drought is nowhere near that long, but the pressure of running a paint scheme built around a career that ran cold is not lost on anyone in that shop.
A tribute livery gets attention for a weekend. A two-time champion racing deep into a title defense without a win, at the track where his Hendrick career effectively began, is the thing actually worth watching once the green flag drops on October 4. If Larson doesn’t find Victory Lane soon, the math NASCAR built to reward aggression is going to leave the sport’s most talented points racer with a nice paint scheme and not much else.
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