After finishing the Cook Out 400 in 12th place at Richmond Raceway on Saturday night, William Byron secured the regular season championship in the NASCAR Cup Series with one race remaining in the regular season.
This is Byron’s first championship in the Cup Series; he earns 15 playoff points to go along with the 17 he has earned throughout the season.
Playoff points follow the driver all through. The playoffs and are added to the base point levels at the end of each round.
Hendricks Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott was in second place in the point standings but was eliminated from winning the regular season championship after being caught up in an eleven car pile up that put him out of the race early. Byron was also involved in the lap 198 pile up but received only minor damage and was able to continue in the race.
Speaking on winning the championship, Byron said, “it’s really the best 12th-place finish I’ve ever had. We came in here and really just did a solid job. We qualified solid. We always want more, but this is definitely our toughest race track. We just kind of came in here, had a solid plan and executed it.”
He added, “this team has worked extremely hard. All the guys have worked hard through the summer months. Feel like this has been the best summer we’ve ever had speed-wise. Had a lot of tough things happen throughout probably really early July. We had a lot of speed, but some crashes in practice and qualifying. Just some car issues and things that happened. Just really, really cool.”
In reference to the crash Byron said, “I was kind of losing my mind there for a minute. It never helps getting damage like that. I felt like, I mean, it was another example of making something out of nothing. We put on that set of tires, and we kind of burned that set of tires, got some track position from that. We got back to the top 10. Then that kind of set us up for a really good Stage 3. All of a sudden, we were in the top five. We just had that bad run where we just couldn’t hang on to all four tires really.”
After opening the season with a Daytona 500 win, William Byron has led the point standings for most of the season; giving the lead over to Chase Elliott briefly when he had a few bad weeks in July.
Speaking on the season overall Byron noted, “I think just finally some things went our way. I think honestly, we’ve been doing a really good job on strategy, execution. We’ve brought good speed in August. I’d say our speed was the best in mid to late June. I would say in May, we were super fast. Then June, we were really fast. I crashed probably our best car at Pocono. Then July we just had some really bad finishes, really bad things happened to us. Ran out of fuel a couple times.”
He added, “I think we buckled down and really got back to the team we’re capable of being. Pretty impressive, August probably. Probably our best August we’ve ever had, just executing, thinking outside the box, bringing fast cars.”
While winning the regular season championship is just the first step toward bringing home the big trophy at Phoenix, it does not guarantee the season championship which can eventually be won by any of the 16 playoff drivers once they make it to the final four.