Just one more race remains in the 2025 Cup Series regular season after the fireworks at the Richmond Raceway on Saturday. It will go down at Daytona International Speedway this coming weekend and finalize the 16 drivers who will race for the title in the postseason. At this crucial juncture, William Byron has come out and offered his aid to fellow Chevrolet teammates.
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The Hendrick Motorsports driver locked his regular-season championship with a 12th-place finish at Richmond. He doesn’t have much to race for at Daytona, and no amount of planning will be enough to tackle the unpredictable superspeedway. So, he has set himself a different and more accomplishable goal.
He was asked if he would be willing to help Alex Bowman, his only teammate at Hendrick Motorsports who hasn’t secured a playoff spot yet. Byron responded, “Yeah, I mean, I’m definitely going to try to help all those guys at Daytona. Just the Chevrolets in general. That’s your best bet. Going through the Playoffs, I’ve learned that. You just have to have allies.”
The No. 24 driver wants to be stronger with his group rather than going solo. This is a particularly sensible game plan considering how important it is to find the right draft at Daytona. The other Chevrolets that might benefit from him include those of Kyle Busch, Carson Hocevar, Michael McDowell, Ricky Stenhouse Jr, and Daniel Suarez.
How Byron won the regular season championship
Byron has not visited the Victory Lane as frequently as Denny Hamlin or Shane van Gisbergen have this season. But his consistency in scoring stage points has kept him in the top two spots of the standings throughout the year. On Saturday, he received 25 points for finishing the race and two points for his ninth-place finish in Stage 2.
Together, these points ensured that he clinched the regular season title one week ahead of the finale at Daytona. He told NBC Sports, “It feels really good to check this one off the list. We kind of had that in the back of our minds this year, just to be consistent. And even through some adversity, we were consistently fast and just up at the front.”
Byron‘s journey to this point wasn’t an easy one. It involved two wins, nine top-five finishes, 13 top-10 finishes, three DNFs, an average finish rate of 13.68, and 241 stage points. He now sits 68 points ahead of his teammate, Chase Elliott, at the top of the table.
