William Byron locked up the NASCAR Cup regular season championship last week at Richmond. But he’s not taking anything for granted in Saturday’s regular season finale at Daytona International Speedway.
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The driver of the No. 24 Team Hendrick Chevrolet has comfortably made the playoffs in all but one of his eight full-time seasons. While he has finished as high as third in the playoffs—in 2023 and 2024—he’s still seeking that elusive first Cup championship. So while, in theory, he could coast Saturday night, that’s not his mindset.
He knows that there are over a dozen drivers who are still winless and are desperate to win Saturday. And that could cause some problems if that desperation turns into aggression, and then that turns into big crashes that impact several other drivers, including those who get wrecked even while minding their own business.
“I think (in) this race, you can feel (the desperation of others) with about 20 to 30 laps to go,” said Byron, who has won the last two Daytona 500s, as well as this race in 2020.
“You can just feel the energy. I understand the mentality, but I don’t see a lot of people making better decisions being desperate. I think the best decisions come from having the right thought process to get yourself to the end of the race and see the checkered. I think a lot of times, you see desperate moves with 10-15 laps to go, and it’s just like man, just get to the end of the race first,” he added.
Is There Any Safe Place to Avoid Late-Race Chaos?
With two wins, nine top-5’s and 13 top-10 finishes in the first 25 races this season, Byron doesn’t have to be near the front of the pack in Saturday’s closing laps, but it’s also a Catch-22 situation for him. If he lies back, happy to settle for a mid-pack finish, he also runs the risk of getting caught in an almost inevitable multi-car ‘big one’ crash.
“I think there’s definitely a lot of that throughout the field,” he said. “For us, we just can go out there and race freely and not really have to worry too much about the outcome. And I think in some ways, the guys that can do that are going to be able to have a freer mindset out there. But yeah, there’s definitely a lot of desperation throughout the field that I think causes probably some early wrecks that probably don’t need to happen.”
Byron is optimistic that things won’t be that way on Saturday.
“I don’t know, maybe it’ll be different this year,” he said. “Maybe guys kind of figured that cadence out a bit. I know when we won the race here in 2020, it was we were fighting with Jimmie (then-teammate Jimmie Johnson) and Matt DiBenedetto, and really what freed us up to go and get the win (which clinched his playoff spot) was just that we were in a good spot on point and then we just went out there and executed the final restart. But yeah, I think you’ll see a lot of different moves out there, for sure.”
As if the desperation isn’t enough to worry about, Byron and the other three-plus dozen drivers have another significant issue that could impact the outcome of the race as well (if not push it to Sunday): there is a 90% chance of rain in the forecast.
