For Hendrick Motorsports, the playoffs have been a rocky road. In the first three postseason races, William Byron has averaged a 14.6 finish, Chase Elliott 19.3, Kyle Larson 21, and Alex Bowman 21.6. For NASCAR’s winningest team, such numbers hardly fit the bill, yet each driver insists he will be leaving no stone unturned in the upcoming races.
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Signs of life surfaced at New Hampshire on Saturday, where Byron set the pace in practice. His 29.795-second lap topped Group B and stood as the fastest overall. He’ll roll off from P5, Bowman from P7, Larson from P16, while Elliott starts deep in the pack at P27.
History, however, casts a long shadow on their chances of doing well at NHMS. Over the past decade at Loudon, Hendrick’s drivers have struggled to move the needle. Since the advent of the Next Gen car in 2022, Toyota has run roughshod, sweeping every Cup race at NHMS, locking down all six stage wins, and leading 83 percent of the laps.
Hendrick‘s four-car stable has notched neither a victory nor a stage win. Across the Chevrolet camp as a whole, just 84 laps have been led in that same span.
Byron, though, believes this weekend could turn the tide. From the third row, he plans to climb the ladder, saying in his pre-race remarks,
“The start of the Playoffs was a shock to us as good as we’ve run all year. There’s been very few races where I felt I’d run worse than eighth, honestly, and then felt like in the first round we were scratching and clawing for top-10s. The first round was a shock to us. We’ve put a lot of work into these three races and putting our best foot forward.”
“There’s still a lot of season left, though. It’s kind of a marathon in and of itself… We had to kind of reset our goals and expectations to kind of survive and advance, and we did that flawlessly. But now it’s kind of time to step it up, and I feel like so far this weekend we’ve done a good job of that, so we’ve just got to keep it going,” he added.
Byron brings an average finish of 17.0 in seven New Hampshire starts, with just four top-20s to show for it. Yet with track position carrying so much weight at Loudon, his top-five starting spot could prove the springboard he needs to charge toward the front.
