The Cup Series regular season and postseason are two different landscapes. Success in the regular season does not guarantee success in the postseason, as proven by plenty of regular-season champions since 2014. The question, in 2025, is whether William Byron can beat the odds, now that he has been crowned the regular season champion of the ongoing season.
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The No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports driver won the regular season championship with two wins, nine top-fives, and 13 top-10s, powering his statistics.
Several drivers have shown such dominance in the past, only to see it all come crashing down in the playoffs. For instance, the iconic Kevin Harvick won seven races in the 2020 regular season and still failed to even make the Championship 4.
Only three drivers, since 2014, have won the regular season championship and gone on to win the Cup Series title. Martin Truex Jr. did it in 2017, Kyle Busch did it in 2019, and Kyle Larson did it in 2021.
Whether or not he succeeds, Byron sure will give it his all to become the fourth name on this list. During the recent playoff media day, he addressed the strengths and weaknesses of his team.
“I think our strength is just that we’re fast at all the different tracks,” he said. “I really don’t see a track where we’re at a big deficit.
“So I think at the same time, though, you never know what everyone else is going to bring and how fast they’re going to be. So we’ve just got to keep working. We can keep getting better, but that’s our strength.”
William Byron is the 2025 Regular Season Champion, finishing 55 points ahead of Ryan Blaney.
Here are all of the Regular Season Champions in the Playoff Era (2014 – Present) pic.twitter.com/34YkvUh0jj
— NASCAR Insights (@NASCARInsights) August 26, 2025
Justifiably, he couldn’t immediately point out an area in which his crew needed to improve. But he raked his brain for a moment and mentioned that they could always be quicker and better on pit road.
He believes that the playoffs are all about getting to the Round of 8 and getting to the peak of performance once there. October, he said, is the most crucial month of the season.
Before getting to the Round of 8 and October, Byron ought to make sure that he doesn’t get knocked out in the Round of 16. We saw Joey Logano getting eliminated in the first round of the 2023 playoffs after winning the title the previous season and having a good regular season.
Unpredictability is indeed the biggest enemy that any driver is going to have to tackle going forward.
