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.
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.
Larson has always been a master of the classic motorsports understated reaction.
But where he has been over that past year and a half he keeps referring to, no racer has been before or since.
7, 2021, he outran now-teammate Elliott and three others to not only win NASCAR’s ultimate prize, he did so by way of the most dominant statistical season seen in nearly a decade and a half.
He became only the seventh driver in 75 years of NASCAR racing to win a Cup Series title one year after not racing in the series full-time, and the first to do it since 1966.
What’s more, he also spent 2021 dominating the American short track scene at a level only matched by the likes of A.J.
Before the tears we saw at Phoenix on Sunday night, there were others we will never see, from those days in April 2020 when he called the likes of Bubba Wallace, Black members of his own race team, and then most painfully, his mother.
Janet Larson is a Japanese-American woman who had been so proud of her son’s development, more easily embracing his Asian heritage as he grew into adulthood, researching his grandparents’ time in World War II internment camps and visiting youth centers to talk to Asian-American kids about his racing career.
Anyone who was there years ago and is also there now, we are fully aware of the very different world that it has become.
Say, showing how someone can learn from their stupidest mistake.
As an interview subject, he has been downright maddening because he’d never allow himself to fully open up and dive as deeply into hard topics of conversation as it felt like he could if he would just give himself permission.
But Sunday night at Phoenix Raceway, amid the most meaningful racing celebration of a lifetime that is marked by trophy after trophy, Larson finally cracked a door into his emotions.
But if he does what he could — what he should — he might very well make some racing dreams come true for someone who thought their race might keep them out of racing.
Silence will only bolster those who see NASCAR as still stuck in 1968, the perceived free pass given to the driver who dropped the N-word and then won the championship one year later.