William Byron capped off a near-perfect race that involved leading 81% of Sunday’s Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway from pole position by finishing in a close runner-up result.
Byron, this year’s two-time Daytona 500 champion from Charlotte, North Carolina, commenced NASCAR’s annual Throwback Weekend at the track deemed “Too Tough to Tame” by claiming the pole position with a blistering lap at 170.904 mph in 28.774 seconds during the event’s qualifying session on Saturday.
The pole marked Byron’s second of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series campaign, his second at Darlington, South Carolina, and the 15th of his career. It also occurred as Byron was sporting a special throwback silver, red, orange and yellow-flamed scheme on his No. 24 AXALTA Chevrolet entry that mirrored the entry his Hendrick Motorsports’ boss and four-time champion Jeff Gordon drove during the latter’s final full-time stint in the No. 24 entry at Homestead-Miami Speedway in 2015.
When the main event commenced on Sunday, Byron was untouchable as he led the first 243 laps and had the clean air to his advantage, both on the track and upon exiting pit road, thanks to stellar pit services from the No. 24 team. In the midst of Byron’s dominance, he swept both of the event’s two stage periods and tallied his stage wins total to three.
During the event’s final cycle of green flag pit stops, however, Byron encountered a roadblock that stalled his dominance. Upon peeling off the racetrack and executing his green-flag pit stop with 50 laps remaining, the Charlotte native was mired behind various competitors, among which included Toyota competitors Christopher Bell and Tyler Reddick, executing different pit strategies that resulted in Byron losing ground to his race-long advantage.
By the time Byron blended back onto the racetrack without his clean air, he was strapped back within the top-five mark, but he trailed the lead from a distance. Despite working his way up to as high as third place in the closing laps and amid lapped traffic, Byron was unable to narrow his deficit to regain the lead.
Then, while initially poised for a fourth-place finish, an opportunity to regain the lead occurred for Byron when teammate Kyle Larson, who had wrecked earlier and was racing multiple laps down, wrecked for a second time in the backstretch with four laps remaining. During the caution period, Byron pitted with the field and exited pit road in third place behind Denny Hamlin and Tyler Reddick, thus gaining one spot on the leaderboard.
Restating in the second row and on the outside lane behind the leader, Hamlin, for an overtime shootout, Byron spent nearly an entire lap dueling and fending off Christopher Bell and Reddick to move into the runner-up spot. Despite scrubbing the outside wall through Turns 3 and 4, Byron successfully claimed the runner-up spot and would proceed to set his sights on Hamlin for both the lead and win when the final lap started. Amid Byron’s last-lap charge, however, he was unable to reel in Hamlin for a final circuit as he cycled back to the frontstretch and crossed the finish line in the runner-up spot while trailing the winner Hamlin by more than half a second.
With his runner-up result, Byron, who scored his first Darlington victory in May 2023, notched his fourth top-five result of the 2025 Cup Series season, his second runner-up finish of the year and his fifth top-five result at Darlington. In addition, Byron, who led a race-high 243 of the event’s 297 over-scheduled laps, had his lead in the regular-season standings increase from 16 to 49 points over Hamlin.
Amid the positives of executing a dominant performance, Byron was left disappointed during the post-race activities on pit road as he had a perfect victory slip out of his grasp in the closing laps.
“First off, [I’m] just really proud of my team,” Byron said on FS1. “To bring that level of effort and preparation and have a car like that and for us to execute like that, it was looking like it was going to be a perfect race. We were going to lead every lap. So was really proud of that. Those guys could just be aggressive on the other side of the green-flag cycle, and we lost control there. And once we lost control, it was too late in the going to get back up there. It sucks. I’m sure it’ll sting a lot tonight. There’s still a lot of positives. It stings in the moment, for sure.”
With the Cup Series’ first of two scheduled visits of the year to Darlington in the rearview mirror, Byron, along with his fellow competitors, will next travel to Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee, for the Food City 500. Having recorded four top-10 results through 11 previous Cup starts at Bristol, Byron will strive to contend for his first series’ victory at Thunder Valley.
The 2025 Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway is scheduled to occur next Sunday, April 13, and air at 3 p.m. ET on FS1.
