William Byron Continues Post-Season Consistency with Top-Five at Las Vegas
After a tough slump during the Summer, William Byron has returned to his usual form in the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, as he looks to bring both himself and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team into the Championship 4 for a second consecutive year.
Sunday’s South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway marked the official start of the three-race semi-final round in the post-season, in which four drivers will advance (either by points or winning a race) to the winner-takes-all championship finale at Phoenix and November.
So naturally, now is the absolute perfect time to have momentum.
Byron mastered the ‘Round of 12’, scoring no finish worse than third in a three-race sequence that includes the unpredictable Talladega Superspeedway and a newly reconfigured Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL.
A fourth-place finish in Sunday’s event at Las Vegas is a solid start to the three-race round, especially considering Byron started the afternoon with a No. 24 Raptor Tools Chevrolet that was ill-handling and barely able to hang onto the top-10 at times.
Byron and crew chief Rudy Fugle were not only able to use strategy to secure an ample number of stage points, but also improved upon the speed and drivability in the Hendrick Motorsports entry, which allowed the 26-year-old to methodically get closer to the front.
“Yeah, we really improved a lot as the day progressed,” said Byron. “That was a lot to be said about this No. 24 RaptorTough.com Chevrolet team, and our ability to get the balance close and get the speed once we had the balance close. We just started the race a little bit off, but I’m really, really happy with how we came on.”
At one point in the race’s final stage, Byron looked to be the only real competition to Christopher Bell, who won the pole for Sunday’s event and looked dominant at the 1.5-mile facility in Las Vegas, Nevada. That was until it turned into a fuel strategy race.
“I thought we were going to have a shot to compete for a win there in the final stage, but it turned into a fuel mileage race,” Byron added.
The race-winning strategy wasn’t the one that Byron and Fugle ended up employing, as Joey Logano stayed on the track during the final 70-lap green-flag run to the finish to capture the victory, while leaders Bell and Byron chose to split it down the middle.
Byron still managed to record a top-five on the afternoon, in fourth, two spots behind the leader on his strategy, Christopher Bell. The No. 24 also finished behind the two most successful drivers on the fuel saving strategy, Joey Logano and Daniel Suarez.
However, the Charlotte, North Carolina-native is aware that even the highest level of consistency likely won’t be enough, with as competitive as this crop of drivers still in the Playoffs is.
“Just sucks. It’s going to take a win, I feel like, so we have to keep working for it and keep running up front,” said Byron. “If we run up front, it will do two things — we’ll be able to compete for a win and score a lot of points. We just have to keep running like this.”
Last season, in the first Championship 4 appearance of his NASCAR Cup Series career, Byron was the only driver to advance without winning a race in the semi-final round. However, when doing so, he had significantly more Playoff Points than he had entering this round.
That extensive level of consistency — to the tune of four consecutive top-four finishes — isn’t a bad thing for Byron, and it could very well get him into the finale at Phoenix. But, as Byron and everybody still in the post-season knows, a win would be superior.
Luckily, the final two tracks in this round of the post-season are places where the No. 24 team have thrived before — winning at Homestead in 2021 and Martinsville in the Spring of 2022 and 2024.
A trip to Victory Lane in the next two weeks would be the first for Byron since the Spring (at Martinsville) and keep him alive in the fight for his first championship. As it stands, consistency, once the ruler in pre-playoff championship fights, may not be enough to advance him through.
