William Byron headed to the Championship 4 round of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs for a second consecutive year in 2024. He made that return trip with Rudy Fugle, a veteran crew chief who’s been a steady companion for some of his most successful stretches — including the last four seasons with Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 24 Chevrolet team.
Byron and Fugle head to Year 5 of their partnership with aspirations of returning to the Cup Series’ title fray at Phoenix Raceway next November, potentially adding more keystone victories along the way. The 27-year-old driver added a big catch in 2024 as the Daytona 500 champion, tacking on two more regular-season wins to clinch safe passage into the playoffs.
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The bonds between Byron and Fugle were formed in the driver’s breakout 2016 season in the Craftsman Truck Series, where the two guided a Kyle Busch Motorsports entry to seven wins, falling just shy of a Champ 4 spot. The two were reunited at the Cup Series level in 2021, and the No. 24 team has barely slowed since, building on their mutual reliance.
“Just trust, confidence, knowledge, work ethic — there’s a lot of different things that are important, key pillars to a relationship like that. So yeah, I feel like he’s done a great job over the years,” Byron said Nov. 22, noting the span of Fugle’s Cup Series tenure. “I mean, he’s getting a lot of experience at this. So yeah, I’m just thankful to have him as a crew chief. It’s a tremendous commitment, and he does it really well.”
Their momentum was not enough to seal a first Cup Series crown for Byron this season, as eventual champ Joey Logano led a convincing Team Penske 1-2 finish in the finale. A reporter planted the notion at the NASCAR Awards that perhaps Fugle had taken the loss harder than Byron after the team’s third-place result in the final standings, given their post-race demeanors. That suggestion prompted Byron to respond with “maybe.”
“I mean, I think he just puts a lot into it, and our roles are different and he wears his emotions on his sleeve, and I love that about him,” Byron added. “So yeah, we’re in a good place. All of our postseason meetings and talks about Phoenix are in a great spot, and we’re ready to go next year. So we have a lot of goals to achieve next year and I feel like he’s in a good place. But yeah, emotions are raw right after the race and sometimes in the car, it’s a little bit different picture than what they see. So yeah, I think it was just kind of real for him.”
About Phoenix, then. The relatively low-banked 1-mile track that will again host the championship race next year has received offseason notes of emphasis by Byron and his Hendrick Motorsports teammates as an area where the organization could use improvement. Similar-length tracks at New Hampshire and Gateway fall under the same heading.
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Understandably selfishly, Byron says he wants performance enrichment across the board for 2025, weighing both the good with the bad from last season. Despite the three victories, his laps-led total for the season (357) was the lowest of the four-year Byron-Fugle era. In positive contrast, Byron ended the year with seven straight top-six finishes in one of the circuit’s most consistent postseason runs.
“I think it was a good year. I’d like to have more speed next year and just lead more laps,” Byron said. “I think a lot of that’s in my control and our team’s control, and I think we can work on that in the offseason, just kind of getting a little bit better at certain tracks. Definitely Phoenix is high on that list. We’ve got a lot of room to improve there. I thought our potential was a little bit better this year compared to last year, honestly, but yeah, we just need to keep working on those tracks and then just lead more laps, and I think there’s a few different ways you do that. So we were really good down the stretch. I mean, the last seven weeks, all top six. So I think that was really, really strong and hard to do, so just need to work on a couple of little things.”
When Byron kicks off the new campaign, he’ll have a near-omnipresent reminder of last year’s successes, striding back into Daytona International Speedway as the defending Daytona 500 champ. He said that among his goals for 2025 is adding more prestigious wins to his career tally — specifically mentioning the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis and the Coca-Cola 600 in his hometown of Charlotte.
He’s held a nearly yearlong reign as the winner of the “Great American Race,” but Byron said the magnitude of the achievement is just now beginning to take hold.
“It’s pretty awesome,” said Byron, who will aim to become the 500’s first back-to-back winner since Denny Hamlin (2019-20). “I mean, I think a lot of people asked me that throughout the spring and the summer, and I didn’t really know how to answer, because I was still trying to achieve the championship and everything like that, just week to week. So yeah, I’ve reflected on it a little bit more now, and it’s awesome for our team. It’s a huge accomplishment, and hopefully we can get more of those crown-jewel wins. That would be my goal.”
