He’s yet to win a NASCAR Cup race at Kansas Speedway. Could this be Byron’s big weekend?
Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson may have retired from NASCAR, but the Hendrick Motorsports assembly line keeps churning out champions.
Chase Elliott won the 2020 Cup championship, and he’s just 26 years old. Kyle Larson, 29, won in 2021.
The latest phenom is William Byron.
Byron, 24, already has won two races this season and was headed for a series-most third win before Joey Logano bumped him from the lead on the penultimate lap at Darlington last week.
Add in Alex Bowman, 28, who like his three 20-something teammates owns at least one win this season, and Byron has plenty of competition within his own race team, let alone against the 36 other drivers on the track.
“Racing against your teammates is where you measure yourself,” said Byron, who ranks second in the points standings going into Sunday’s Advent Health 400 at Kansas Speedway. “But there are other guys in the field who are competitive. You’ve seen the Joe Gibbs guys are fast, Ross Chastain is fast.
“It’s just about managing your race. Try to be good every single week and knowing that your teammates are going to be right there to challenge you for wins is a good thing.”
Byron, who signed a threeyear contract extension with Hendrick last week, owns wins at Atlanta and Martinsville in the hallowed No. 24 Chevrolet vacated by three-time Cup champion Gordon. That gave Byron his first multi-win season in five years as a Cup driver.
He yet to win in eight Cup starts at Kansas, but the track holds a special place for Byron.
In 2016, in his fifth career start, he won the trucks race at Kansas Speedway shortly before his high school graduation in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the first of his seven trucks wins that year and kickstarted a career that eventually put Byron in the Hendrick Motorsports powerhouse.
“I was really young back then,” he said. “I was so green and fresh in NASCAR and in racing in general. It was that first breakthrough win, which was great, but there was a lot of work after that.”
Byron went on to become the second driver to win Rookie of the Year honors in all three of NASCAR’s national series — trucks (2016), Xfinity (2017) and Cup (2018) — before getting his first Cup win in the No. 24 in July 2020 at Daytona.
Gordon, now a vice chairman for Hendrick Motorsports, helped make the transition to the Cup series easier for Byron.
“I was a kid in Xfinity that was really raw and didn’t know a lot about the world, and Jeff brought me into the Cup world and said, ‘Here’s how things go,’’’ Byron said. “That’s been key for me because he’s probably been the biggest mentor for me in terms of how do I manage the team, how do I talk to the guys, how do I get things done when it comes to inside the shop and how I work with people …
‘Hey, I want this on my car or I want this in the interior of the car.’ He was very vocal about getting all that stuff right, and those are the details that are paying off for me.”
While Byron has qualified for the postseason in each of the last three seasons, he has yet to be a factor in the playoffs, posting finishes of 11th, 14th and 10th in the final standings. This year, armed with the power of playoff points from two wins, and 12 more races to build on before the postseason, Byron is more confident in his chances to join Larson and Elliott — both former winners at Kansas — as Cup champions for Hendrick.
“I felt like last year left us with a pretty bitter taste because I felt like we were so close to a lot of wins in that second half of the year, and man, it just felt like good things would happen and things would break down right at the last minute,” said Byron, who finished ninth and sixth in the two Cup races at Kansas Speedway last year.
“But it was motivation for this year. Granted, it’s a new car … but I feel like we’re starting to learn what we need. Now I feel like all of that desire and passion that we had in the offseason to prove to ourselves that we could win multiple races is there.”