Regular season champ William Byron claims summer slump talk is ‘overblown’

William Byron won the regular season championship, and enters the NASCAR Cup Playoffs tied with teammate Kyle Larson for the most bonus points at 32. That gives him a fairly comfortable buffer to the drop zone, but is the No. 24 team truly ready to contend for a championship?

Byron started the year by winning the Daytona 500, but the summer months have been a bit all over the place. Despite a fuel-milage win at Iowa Speedway, Byron has six finishes of 16th or worse in the last ten races. And to top it all off, he ended the regular season with a pre-race penalty after NASCAR

“Yeah, I don’t really know if we were slumping,” said Byron during Playoff Media Day on Wednesday. “I think that’s really overblown. We were the fastest car at Pocono before I crashed in qualifying and then had the fastest lap at Chicago in practice before I crashed. Then we showed up at Iowa and won a couple weeks later. So I don’t really feel like we were ever in a slump. I just think we didn’t have the results. If we were trying to get through the playoffs, maybe that would be different. But I feel really good about our team this year and feel like we’re in a good spot.”

Despite the inconsistent summer, Byron remains one of the favorites to go all the way to the Championship 4 this year. He made the finals in both 2023 and 2024, but he failed to capture the title both times.

“It further proves that nothing else matters besides winning the championship in this 10-race stretch,” said Byron, when asked about his recent shots at the title. “Winning races would be awesome throughout the rounds. But when you get to the final round, it’s all about winning that race. There’s not much consolation. Pointing your way through is great and gives you a chance to get to Phoenix. But it doesn’t really mean much.”

Byron also admitted that this year has been an up-and-down one, with the No. 24 showing plenty of speed, but the results just not reflecting that.

Byron has had several wins slip through his fingertips this year, including two different races where he led over 250 laps but failed to win. At Michigan, he led almost half the race before finishing 28th as he ran out of fuel in the closing laps.

“I think we’ve been through a lot of adversity this year,” noted Byron. “I feel like in the past we’ve had races that we weren’t in contention maybe, and we won. And then this year we’ve dominated some races and didn’t win those. That’s what I mean by battle-tested. We came back from those, and we carried that same speed, but we overcame. I think that’s what I mean. It’s just kind of a little bit more battle-tested. We’ve been through a lot of adversity in July. July was a really rough month result-wise. Then to come into August and have such a good month was really good to see.”

If Byron does go on to win the title, he will be the first driver to win both the Daytona 500 and the NASCAR Cup Series championship in the same season since 2013, when another Hendrick driver did it — seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson.