MARTINSVILLE, Va. – With a heroic, gloves-off drive on Sunday in the crucible that is Martinsville Speedway, William Byron earned a shot at the NASCAR Cup Series title and simultaneously saved the rest of the Championship 4 field from its worst nightmare.
Byron led three times for 304 laps – a career best for a single race – and beat Ryan Blaney to the finish line by 0.717 seconds after a restart with 11 laps left to win the Xfinity 500 elimination race under most exigent circumstances.
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In a scenario under which both Byron and Blaney needed a victory to advance to the Nov. 2 Championship 4 event at Phoenix Raceway (3 p.m. ET, NBC, Peacock, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App), Byron passed Blaney on Lap 456 during a long green-flag run and held the top spot for the final 44 laps.
“Pass” doesn’t do Byron’s move on Lap 456 justice. By then, Blaney’s No.12 Team Penske Ford had begun to fade. Byron charged into Turn 1 to the inside of Blaney’s Mustang and knocked it up the track.
Byron rushed past, and Blaney never found an opportunity to return the favor. Hence, for the first time since the Next Gen race car was introduced into the Cup Series in 2022, Team Penske, the organization that won the last three championships, won’t have a driver in the Championship 4 – and the rest of the field can sleep more soundly.
“Damn, I’ve got a lot to say,” Byron said with a broad smile. “Things have a way of working out. God really tests your resilience a lot of times. We’ve been tested. Just unbelievable.
“I’m out of breath. Thank you, fans, for coming out. Badass crowd. I watched my first NASCAR race up there just before the start/finish line. Man, I am just so thankful, excited to see my family, just celebrate this one.
“We obviously go to Phoenix. Just go try to kick ass there.”
Blaney, who went to Victory Lane to congratulate the race winner, had no issue with Byron’s winning move.
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“Yeah, I look back on that long run before the last yellow where William got by me,” said Blaney, who qualified 31st and methodically worked his way through the field. “I just got loose, trying to work through that. My rear drive was fading quick. I tried to manage a lot in the beginning. Yeah, just was starting to fade.
“I was trying to protect. I mean, that’s just two guys going for it. I don’t blame him for taking that. I had kind of lost momentum. I would have done the same thing, to be honest with you. I knew it was going to be tight. I tried to crowd as much as I could.”
Byron’s victory in a must-win situation knocked seventh-place finisher Christopher Bell out of the championship race. Bell came to Martinsville 37 points above the elimination line and one point ahead of Kyle Larson, but Larson, who finished fifth, outscored Bell on Sunday and claimed the final Championship 4 berth by seven points.
Also eliminated were third-place finisher Chase Elliott and reigning series champion Joey Logano, who ran eighth.
Larson and Byron will represent Hendrick Motorsports against Joe Gibbs Racing drivers Denny Hamlin and Chase Briscoe in the season finale. Hamlin and Briscoe already had qualified for the title race with victories in the Round of 8, but both experienced apparent engine failures at Martinsville.
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“We had good enough track position all day,” said Larson, who ran a problem-free race. “We were kind of out of the mess, I guess. Yeah, that was good. My HendrickCars.com Chevy was fast. Our pit crew was on it all night.
“What a performance by William. That’s awesome. I think when the 12 (Blaney) gained control of the race, it was going to be really hard for anybody to beat him. William did a great job on the restarts, just kept positioning himself. Was good enough to get by him on that long run.”
Byron dominated Stage 1 from the pole, leading 126 of the 130 laps. He surrendered the top spot only once, under caution on Lap 30 after a tangle in Turn 2 when Michael McDowell got the lead on an ill-fated two-tire call.
Byron charged past McDowell moments after the subsequent Lap 36 restart and led the remaining 95 laps of the stage. After the break, he was first off pit road under caution and still at the point when Stage 2 went green on Lap 141.
The driver of the No. 24 Chevrolet led all 130 laps in Stage 2, but a caution on Lap 242 changed the tenor of the race. Blaney was one of seven lead-lap drivers who pitted on Lap 245, and after Byron came to pit road during the stage break, Blaney lined up second beside Tyler Reddick for a restart on Lap 272.
Blaney soon had the lead and control of the race – and maintained it until Byron made the winning pass on Lap 457.
The final restart after Carson Hocevar’s third spin of the afternoon was academic. Byron pulled away and wasn’t challenged over the final 11 laps. Even Blaney was impressed.
“Thought I got a good restart, the last one,” said Blaney, who led 177 laps. “Kind of entered up top, tried to carry speed and he just motored right around me on the bottom. Pretty impressive.
“Just proud of the effort,” added Blaney, who had won the previous two fall playoff races at Martinsville. “A shame we’re not going to Phoenix as part of the Championship 4. We’ll be doing the best we can to finish the year out strong. But I’m just proud of the 12 guys. They gave 100 percent of what they had. That’s all you can ask for.
“Wasn’t quite enough tonight. We’ll just move on.”
Non-playoff drivers Ross Chastain and Ryan Preece ran fourth and sixth, respectively. Todd Gilliland and Josh Berry were ninth and 10th.
Note: Inspection in the Cup Series garage was completed without issue, confirming Byron as the winner and making the Championship 4 field official. No cars will return to the NASCAR R&D Center in Concord, North Carolina for further evaluation.
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Kyle Larson surges back to Championship 4; Christopher Bell ousted at Martinsville
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MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Kyle Larson and Christopher Bell entered Sunday’s Round of 8 finale at Martinsville Speedway well aware of the objective: Be quicker than the other guy, and you’ll have a great chance to advance to the NASCAR Cup Series Championship 4.
Larson did exactly that in Sunday’s Xfinity 500, keeping his No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet ahead of Bell at both stage breaks and at the checkered, advancing Larson back to the Championship 4 for the third time in the past five seasons by a slim seven-point margin. Bell, on the other hand, was ousted from title contention in the final race of the semifinal round for the second consecutive year.
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The No. 5 team’s advantage began in qualifying on Saturday, when Larson qualified third and Bell 12th. Larson used that track position to his benefit Sunday, finishing third in Stage 1 and second in Stage 2 to earn a combined 17 stage points. Bell wound up eighth in Stage 1 and third in Stage 2 for a total of 11 stage points. What was a one-point deficit for Larson at the green flag was suddenly padded by adding those six extra points, all of which paid dividends late as Larson defended late, ultimately finishing fifth with Bell seventh.
Stoic as always, Larson was unfazed by the task at hand and managed his race to perfection en route to another Championship 4 appearance, joining teammate William Byron and Joe Gibbs Racing’s Denny Hamlin and Chase Briscoe.
“It was a little less stressful because I recognized that we were better than Christopher in car performance, and we were just in front of him all night,” Larson said. “I knew when we got a good first stage that it was not gonna be easy, but the math was gonna be much easier. I just had to keep him kind of within my sights at that point.
“Our team just did a great job and we didn’t have any hiccups really. I definitely could have had some better restarts. But like I said, when I had outscored Christopher, I was just playing it a little bit easy and kind of wanted to just tuck in line and go from there. Happy to be in the final four. Really proud of William. That was a hell of a drive. So yeah, we’ve got two Hendrick cars going for a championship, and yeah, hopefully we can do it for Rick (Hendrick, team owner).”
The No. 5 team went through supreme highs and challenging lows this season, beginning by winning three of the first 12 races of the year, then riding a performance slump through the summer earmarked by off-track challenges like personal losses and personnel changes that have left Larson in the midst of a 23-race winless streak, his longest stretch outside Victory Lane since joining Hendrick Motorsports in 2021.
In each of Larson’s prior four seasons, he said Sunday, he spent the full year believing the No. 5 team was a Championship 4 caliber team. With so much adversity thrown their way this season, that wasn’t the case this year.
“We got so far off in the middle, I was like, we’re gonna have to get really lucky to make the final four,” Larson said. “But we’ve just continued to work really hard. I think most years, we’ve just kind of rode that high, and not necessarily that we’ve tapered off in the playoffs, but I think other teams have been where we were this year and they’ve had to work really hard. And the poor performance that we had throughout the summer just made everybody at the shop work really hard.
“Even when we started the playoffs and were really bad, they just took it a whole other couple levels of trying to figure out why we’ve struggled. It’s just really satisfying to see that. I didn’t think we could flip that switch in the playoffs, but I think it just proves 10 weeks is a long time.”
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Left to deal with the heartbreak of missing the Championship 4 was Bell, who climbed from his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota knowing his title hopes were ending at the 0.526-mile short track for the second straight year. Simply put, Bell was unable to match Larson’s pace throughout the weekend, particularly in Sunday’s race. Larson averaged a third-best 5.13 running position according to NASCAR Loop Data, while Bell posted a sixth-best average running position of 8.03.
“We just weren’t good enough,” Bell said. “I mean, (whether it was) seven points, one point, it doesn’t really matter. We knew that the goal was that we were gonna have to outrun the 5, and he outran us. That’s all she wrote.”
The yellow flag waved at Lap 398 with Larson running ninth and Bell 10th. Crew chief Adam Stevens opted to bring Bell to pit road for fresh tires while Larson stayed out, the hope being that fresh Goodyear rubber would allow Bell to charge through the field. Larson restarted on the inside of Row 5 with Bell on the outside of Row 6, but while Larson charged forward, Bell said he “was just trapped back there.”
“We kind of got hung on the outside on that restart and actually fell back to 15th or so, and that hurt us,” Stevens told NASCAR.com. “I don’t think it was going to make a difference. At the end of the day, we had to finish five or six spots ahead of them, and even if we had a fantastic restart, I don’t think that was going to happen.”
Bell, a Championship 4 contestant in 2022 and 2023, said he lacked the long-run pace necessary to contend Sunday at Martinsville, the site of his walk-off win in 2022 that propelled him to his first title-race berth. It was also the site of a heart-wrenching ousting last year, when a 27-minute post-race wait was needed to sort out the results, and a last-lap wall ride left Bell out of the title quartet.
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“It feels a lot better than last year, for sure,” Bell said. “I genuinely feel like the four going there are very deserving, and it is what it is. We knew coming in here we were gonna have to outrun the 5, and we didn’t.”
Joining Bell on the championship outskirts are defending series champion Joey Logano, 2023 champ Ryan Blaney and 2020 champion Chase Elliott.
The NASCAR Cup Series championship will be decided at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, Nov. 2 at 3 p.m. (NBC, Peacock, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
