Larry Larson is and perhaps always will be regarded as the king of true street legal drag racing, thanks to his impressive run of Drag Week victories and performance records. But the Kansas City-area chassis builder may soon reign over the no prep world, as well, if he continues the pace he’s presently on.

Behind the wheel of his familiar five-second, 240 mph, fully street legal Chevrolet S-10 pickup, Larson won half — six out of 12 — no prep races that he attended in 2017. And it all culminated with one of his biggest victories in the no prep arena to date at Shannon Morgan’s Redemption 9.0 last weekend at the Evadale Raceway in Southeast Texas. Larson’s twin-turbocharged pickup powered away from Cody Baker’s “Shake N Bake” supercharged ’69 Camaro in the final round of Outlaw Big Tire, closing his season on a high note and filling his pockets with an extra $10,000.

“We got to run Tony Foulks and Chuck in ‘the 55’, both of whom we’d never run, so that was good. It was just a great weekend,” said Larson.

Never one to shy away from a mano-a-mano battle with the best in the business, Larson cites his victory in Fayetteville, Arkansas in late July as his most gratifying no prep triumph of 2017, as he downed heavy-hitters Kye Kelley, Brent Austin and his “Megalodon” Camaro, and James “Birdman” Finney on his way to the crown. He and Finney locked horns again at Redemption 10.0 in October, where Birdman evened the score at 1-1.

Widely considered the premier no prep racer in the nation, it could well be argued that only Finney stands in the way of Larson rising to the top of the Big Tire food chain, although there are certainly other players in the conversation, such as Chuck Seitsinger and Kayla Morton.

“I talked to Birdman the day after Armageddon, and he said, ‘well it looks like you’re going to be a force to be reckoned with,’ and I responded, ‘the day I hear my name mentioned in the same sentence as yours, I’ll feel like I’ve done something.’ He’s won a lot of races and done really well.” Larry shares.

In addition to wins at Redemption 9.0 and 10.0 and the All In All Star Weekend win at Fayetteville, Larson also won the Operation Outlaw title at Kansas Speedway, Street Car Takeover in Topeka, and split a contest at Horsepower on the Plains. He added another Rocky Mountain Race Week crown to his resume, as well, along with a host of final and late-round appearances, putting together a season anyone would envy.

And that success, he says, is a direct result of the consistency he and racing partner Jeff Stacy have been able to achieve on the varying qualites of surfaces they’ve raced on throughout the season.

“That’s one of the things we pride ourselves on most. The Kansas Speedway pit road was probably the worst surface we’ve raced on, and this weekend [at Redemption] was probably the best one, and we’ve adapted well. A few of the regulars were scratching their heads this weekend with the better track conditions trying to figure it out,” he says.

“All in all, it’s been a pretty good year,” he adds.

That it has certainly been, and it sets the stage for an exciting 2018 season in which Larson and company intend to again contest the many top-paying no prep events and insert themselves squarely into the conversation of no prep racing’s elite.