William Byron put on a dominating performance when he needed it most.
The Hendrick Motorsports driver beat Ryan Blaney in an 11-lap dash and won the Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway, putting him in the field with teammate Kyle Larson for next weekend’s championship race after Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Round of 8 finale in Martinsville, Va.
With Blaney leading and the pair charging to the historic short track’s first turn, Byron’s No. 24 Chevrolet clipped Blaney’s No. 12 Ford with 43 laps left to send it up the track and give him track position.
Byron later won a race off pit road following the 10th caution with 18 laps to go and drove away from Blaney by 0.717 seconds for his third win this season and third at Martinsville.
More importantly, the 27-year-old Byron, who started outside the points cutline in fifth, led a career-high 304 laps to put himself into the Championship 4 for the third straight season, joining Denny Hamlin, Chase Briscoe and Larson.
“Things have a way of working out,” Byron said after his 16th career victory. “We’ve been tested. … I watched my first NASCAR race up there (in the Martinsville stands). We obviously go to Phoenix and try to kick ass there.
“You just work so hard, and you put everything into Sundays. Sometimes you don’t get anything in return. That’s been the last couple of weeks. … You just have to keep being resilient, and we were.”
Blaney, who started 31st and was overwhelming much of the 500-lap race’s second half, said he did not blame Byron at all and would likely have done the same with a title berth at stake.
“I was starting to fade, and I was trying to protect – yeah, that’s just two guys going for it,” said the 2023 champ, who led 177 laps. “I don’t blame him for taking that. I kind of lost momentum, and I would have done the same thing, to be honest with you. I knew it was going to be tight, and I tried to crowd as much as I could.”
Larson advanced over Christopher Bell by seven points.
Chase Elliott, Ross Chastain and Larson rounded out the top five at Martinsville.
The failure of Blaney and Team Penske teammate Joey Logano to advance ended the organization’s three-year championship streak and kept Ford from winning a title.
Polesitter Byron showed the way around the half-mile flat track over the first 70 laps ahead of teammates Larson and Elliott, but Blaney was the biggest mover as he went from his 31st starting spot to 16th.
By Lap 108, Blaney maneuvered into the top 10, but Byron held the point and claimed Stage 1 after 130 laps.
Following Carson Hocevar’s caution-producing spin on Lap 217, Byron restarted with the lead with about 35 laps to go and endured single-car incidents by Cole Custer and Cody Ware late in Stage 2 as the hard-charging Blaney made it to second.
Bell and Larson, who started the race by gridding third and fourth in the standings, respectively, raced each other hard as Byron drove off to win Stage 2.
In a 40-lap span, Briscoe and Hamlin both had their Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota engines expire, putting pressure on the reliability of Bell’s Camry, which was running fourth and trying to outpoint Larson’s Chevy.
A sequence of green-flag pit stops occurred just before Erik Jones spun between Turns 3 and 4 for the eighth caution.
–Field Level Media
