Before his win last Sunday at Iowa Speedway, William Byron had gone winless for 21 races in the Cup Series. His last win came at the season-opening Daytona 500. Despite the relative slump, the Hendrick Motorsports driver feels he is in a prime position now.
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Speaking to Shannon Spake on NASCAR’s The Day After, Byron touched upon the mindset within his No. 24 team right now. Despite the racecraft lacking at times, he felt there’s always one constant that his HMS Chevy always had: speed.
He said, “I think we’re better than we’ve ever been. I mean, honestly, I feel more speed in the race car. I feel more aware of what it takes and I feel like our team as a group is just more experienced and we’re just bringing faster cars. The execution piece has not really been in our control lately. We’ve been in some crashes that weren’t our making…
“But we continue to bring speed. So yeah, to win this late in the summer like this, is a really good sign for our team. I just feel like when our backs are up against any sort of wall, like when we kind of lost quite a few points and dropped down to second, we come back the next week and are stronger.”
Byron said he was confident about his team and, although it was still early in the season, they had made it to the final four in the past couple of years. He added that they just needed to put the pieces together for another strong run. But the challenge of winning the finale might come from within his own camp.
Byron’s ready for the “battle down the stretch”
The Team Hendrick trio of Byron, Chase Elliott, and Kyle Larson occupy the top three positions in the standings right now. Byron was asked by Spake about how this affects his self-motivation and make himself perform better.
He replied, “I think there’s just a really good mutual respect between all of us. We all work really hard together and honestly, all of us have morphed our styles to race this car and be effective with it. We’re all a little bit different. So, I learned different things from each guy in the debrief sessions.”
Byron also believed that it won’t be an easy task to battle them, given that he would be racing at some of their best race tracks as well. He expressed hope to continue to show up, especially with how points lead can evaporate within a couple stages of a race.
