CHARLOTTE, N.C. — William Byron won the NASCAR Cup Series regular season championship and makes his seventh consecutive playoff appearance when the 10-race charge to the championship begins Sunday at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway.
Byron, who won twice so far this season, drives the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet and believes his advantage entering the playoffs is that his car is fast at all types of tracks.
“I think our strength is just that we’re fast at all the different tracks. I really don’t see a track that we’re at a big deficit,” said Byron, who has made it to the Championship 4 twice. “So I think at the same time, though, you never know what everyone else is going to bring and how fast they’re going to be. So we’ve just got to keep working. We can keep getting better, but that’s our strength.
“And then I guess the area we can improve is… I don’t know. There’s not a huge glaring area. We could always be faster on pit road. We could always be faster, have a better-balanced car. But I think the underlying theme of the playoffs is just you’ve got to get to the Round of Eight, and then you’ve got to start peaking as that round goes. October is the most important time of the year.”
After Darlington, the series visits World Wide Technology Raceway and Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway to complete the Round of 16.
Byron says that finding a way to win the championship is the only thing that matters during the final 10-race stretch of the season.
“It further proves that nothing else matters besides winning the championship in this 10-race stretch,” he said. “Winning races would be awesome throughout the rounds. But when you get to the final round, it’s all about winning that race. There’s not much consolation. Pointing your way through is great and gives you a chance to get to Phoenix. But it doesn’t really mean much.”
That said, Byron knows his team is consistent when it comes to scoring points.
“Yeah, I mean, we’ve historically been a really good team at getting points,” the Charlotte, N.C., native said. “If you look at the last two years, I would say at the end of ’23 we became really good at kind of gathering points and then at the end of ’24 as well, and that’s carried over to all season this year. I don’t want to lose that at all, but you obviously want to be aggressive to go and try to get race wins as well.”
Byron, 27, enters the playoffs second in the standings behind teammate Kyle Larson.
“I think in our position, we’ve had that conversation of just trying to stack some more points and stack some more race wins,” Byron said. “I think we’ve been in this position before, and we feel like we kind of understand the cadence of the first round. It’d be really nice to go out there and win one of these just to take the pressure off and have some forward momentum, as well.
“They’re good tracks for us. I think Darlington’s the best in the first round for us. The other two can be hit or miss for us, but who knows? We could be really fast at those. So just, yeah, we’ll see.”
