William Byron won seven times in just one NASCAR Truck Series season in 2016. He won four more times in the NASCAR Xfinity Series a year later in 2017. That’s 11 victories and a championship (2017) in only two years in NASCAR. That led him to a seat at the table at Hendrick Motorsports.

Byron, as a 20 year old, was in a full time NASCAR Cup Series season with one of NASCAR’s premiere teams. Not only that, he would take over the famed No. 24 Chevrolet that Jeff Gordon drove to 93 victories and four championships. Just before him, Chase Elliott piloted that car but with Byron moving up, Elliott elected to shift to his dads number (No. 9) and leave Byron for the pressure packed ride.

Unfortunately, as we sit here three years later, Byron has yet to win a points paying Cup race. He’s 0-for-88. He did win his Duel at Daytona back in February, that he’d get crashed early on in the Daytona 500 and finish last.

He’s won some historic poles. He won the Daytona 500 pole, Coca-Cola 600 pole and Southern 500 pole just one year ago. He’s just yet to win a race.

“A little bit,” Byron said on if his winless start to his Cup career has reached a boiling point in frustration. “It’s definitely easy to get frustrated with the fact that we haven’t won. I think that at this point, just with our progression we had last year, at this point we would have thought we’d have a few more late-race chances at it.”

The North Carolina native notes that he has had some cars capable of winning over the last three years. Unfortunately, he’s had a plethora of issues that he said were no fault of one thing or one individual that’s kept them from celebrating in victory lane.

“We’ve just not executed in those situations,” Byron said. “We’ve had flat tires and different issues. Those were some of our best races and some of our best chances to win and unfortunately, those kind of got washed away for us.

“Honestly, we just try to continue bringing the same speed and we know if we can bring that same speed that we’ve had on those weekends when things did go wrong, we’ll give ourselves a shot to win. So, yeah, we expect to win. We hope to win soon. We’ve just got to continue to bring the speed to do it and hopefully execute those moments.”

Maybe that comes this weekend at the Kentucky Speedway. He won the Truck Series race here in 2016. He was seventh in the July Xfinity Series race a year later. On the Cup side, he’s struggled, but that’s not all him either. HMS has struggled overall on the 1.5-mile track as they’ve yet to win here too.

“Really, for us, I just think watching the Xfinity race last night and seeing how dirty the track was,” Byron said on his concerns for Kentucky this weekend. “I think, honestly, just kind of watching again tonight (Friday), actually, and seeing if the groove widens-out to how we want it to. I think it seemed like the PJ1 was pretty dominant in that upper lane, really just the lane off the bottom, so hopefully the bottom is there for us. I know that we carry more throttle than the Xfinity cars, so I feel like we’re a little less susceptible to the JP1 adding that much grip for us. So, maybe the bottom will have some more grip for us, and we can run side-by-side.”

Does a driver pay attention to the Trucks, ARCA and Xfinity Series races on like tracks?

“For me, honestly, I pay attention to them quite a bit,” said Byron of that. “I think there’s a little bit you can take away from both cars. The Xfinity car has less downforce, significantly, than our car. So, typically sometimes they run against the wall at a certain track, we might not be as susceptible to running against the wall to make lap time as they are, but I definitely watch their cars because of the quality of competition to see where they run, what lane works on a restart, and things of that nature.

“And then, I watch the Trucks because our aero package is probably more similar in some ways to their cars. So, I’m watching what lanes go in the restarts and what lanes get dragged back with side-draft and things of that nature. So, there’s a little bit to learn. It’s definitely cool having them before us on the weekend, especially with no practice. If we’re the first thing on track for that weekend, it’s a little bit concerning just to kind of know what you’re going to do and how you’re going to respond.”

So is his crew chief Chad Knaus. He’s a detailed oriented guy and won seven championships and 83 races with Jimmie Johnson. Now, he’s in his second season with Byron. You know it’s eating at him to not have won yet too.