Kyle Larson refused to get carried away with his chances of winning a third career NASCAR Cup Series championship after his dominant display at Talladega Superspeedway.

Larson took a commanding lead atop the Cup Series playoff point standings after surging to victory in the third-to-last race of The Chase on Sunday, Oct. 25, one in which his chief rivals faltered.

The No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet went from 11th to first on the final lap at Talladega to create a massive gap atop the standings and all but clinch his third Cup Series championship. Going into the penultimate race of The Chase at Martinsville Speedway, Larson leads second-place Denny Hamlin by 73 points.

That advantage means Larson needs 59 points to clinch the championship at Martinsville and effectively make The Chase finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway futile.

But as there is still at least one more meaningful race to be run, Larson is not jumping the gun. The 34-year-old veteran is too streetwise to believe everything will fall into place in his final two races, especially with a hungry pack of contenders vying to take his spot.

"It's so easy to look at it and be like, 'Oh, the 5's got it,'" Larson said after taking the checkered flag at Talladega, his third victory of The Chase.

"We could go to Martinsville and there be a stack in turn 3 on the first lap. I could cave in the radiator and be done. I'm just saying there's still a lot of racing left. So much in the Chase. All you (media) guys in here are like, 'This person is out; this person has it locked up.' They win or something happens, boom, the picture completely changes.

"I'm not getting ahead of myself at all. I'm not going to let you guys get me ahead of myself, either."

While Larson's current run of form suggests the championship is all but locked up, there is plenty that can go wrong for the Hendrick Motorsports star over the course of the final two races.

Even if he runs a clean race at Martinsville, but doesn't accrue enough stage points or a high enough finish, there is a chance he enters the finale at Homestead-Miami in need of a certain points tally to clinch the title.

As Larson touched on after Talladega, just about anything can go wrong in a NASCAR Cup Series race - from crashes to his car to weather conditions - that could derail his hopes of a third career championship.

Entering the penultimate race, the top-10 in the drivers' points standings are as follows: Larson (2441 points), Hamlin (2368), Christopher Bell (2367), Chase Briscoe (2362), Joey Logano (2341), Ryan Blaney (2334), Tyler Reddick (2315), Ty Gibbs (2258), Austin Cindric (2258), and Carson Hocevar (2243).