William Byron has been the best NASCAR Cup Series playoff driver in the last two races.
Not only has he earned back-to-back top-five finishes, he’s also been the highest-finishing playoff driver. This has seen Byron and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team already locked into the Round of 8 on points, and going into the elimination race at the Charlotte road course, they are the only ones guaranteed a spot in the next round.
Byron also leads the overall point standings, although in the postseason that hardly matters when it’s about getting to Phoenix Raceway and being the last man standing. You can ask him what it meant to lead the Cup Series in multiple statistics last year before the finale played out at Phoenix. Spoiler alert: It meant nothing. He didn’t win the championship. The 2017 Xfinity series title-winner finished third behind Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney and his own teammate, Kyle Larson.
But being the only driver locked into the next round and heading the points table has to feel good for now. Actually, it probably feels really good for a driver who was given the chance to defend his race team over the weekend.
Byron was asked by RACER if he was bothered by the comments about his race team. The question stemmed from him telling NBC Sports after the Kansas Speedway race that his team has “gotten a lot of [crap] over the summer.” It was a reference to what’s become a common theme in recent seasons: the No. 24 team has a dip in results through the midseason.
“It doesn’t bother me that people say or notice, but it bothers me (because) we’re not that much different from any other team,” Byron said. “If you look statistically, we have 10 top fives and 16 top 10s, and that’s right in line with the other five or six guys that we’re racing. So, yes, we haven’t had a stellar season based on what we did last year, but we’re still plugging along and finishing races in the front … and we just need to continue that.”
The statistics are spot on. Byron has the second most wins in the series – three – behind teammate Kyle Larson and second most top-10 finishes (16) behind Joe Gibbs Racing driver Christopher Bell.
And to further prove Byron’s point, the top 10 drivers in the Cup Series standings indeed have similar numbers.
- Byron: three wins, 10 top fives, 16 top 10s
- Bell: three wins, 11 top fives, 19 top 10s
- Larson: five wins, 12 top fives, 15 top 10s
- Denny Hamlin: three wins, 10 top fives, 15 top 10s
- Alex Bowman: one win, seven top fives, 15 top 10s
- Ryan Blaney: two wins, nine top fives, 14 top 10s
- Tyler Reddick: two wins, 11 top fives, 19 top 10s
- Chase Elliott: one win, eight top fives, 15 top 10s
- Joey Logano: two wins, five top fives, nine top 10s
- Daniel Suarez: one win, three fives, seven top 10s
“It bothers me that we get treated a little differently because everyone this year has been, for the most part, pretty inconsistent,” Byron continued. “But for us, we’re trying to continue to put weeks together and plug away and try to put back-to-back weeks together. It’s tough when you go from a mile-and-a-half to a speedway; you don’t really have control of that result. So, we’re trying to do more of that – more consistency.”
If the results were skewed during the summer, it was, Byron admitted, the product of fast cars with no payoff or slow cars that finished only where they were capable. Byron ended the regular season fifth in the championship standings and was reseeded fourth with 22 playoff points.
Although the comments rubbed him the wrong way, Byron didn’t take it as being written off as a contender for the championship. Nor should he be.
“I feel like there’s a certain narrative out there of, ‘Hey, they’re not good in the summertime,’ and I don’t know if that’s completely true,” Byron said. “I think we have certain races that are great in the summertime and I think we had certain weeks that we weren’t that great. But you can look across the whole garage and that’s pretty consistent.”
Which is why Byron still has as good a shot as anyone to win the Cup Series title. Over the last few weeks he’s been the one who has stood out from the field, and it must bring him added satisfaction that the team is showing its capabilities at the time it matters most.