William Byron overcame pit road penalty after the opening stage and a spin early on in the second stage to score his fourth win of the season in Sunday’s rain shortened Quaker State 400 at the Atlanta Motor Speedway.

How did he do so?

 “Just teamwork. Honestly I don’t completely understand this one,” Byron admitted after scoring his 8th career win. “It’s a really good feeling. I’ve never had a rain victory like this. But just thanks to AXALTA Chevrolet. It’s cool.

“Rudy made a good call to pit there and then stay out, and once we got towards the front it was okay. We could honestly make the right decisions, block okay, and got the lead from AJ and just was able to manage the run.

“Just a crazy night.”

Sometimes all you need is a little lady luck on your side. That’s exactly what happened to Byron. With rain closing, most knew that it was only a matter of time before this race ends. The problem was, no one knew exactly when the rain was coming.

So, Byron was one of nine drivers to duck down pit road during the fifth caution of the night.

On Lap 122, Corey LaJoie and Erik Jones made contact exiting Turn 2. It sparked a seven-car incident. Two laps later, Byron, AJ Allmendinger, Daniel Suarez, Todd Gilliland, Kyle Busch, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Cole Custer and JJ Yeley elected to pit.

Why not? They lacked track position and were gambling that the rain would fall long enough into the final stage that those ahead would still need to pit themselves.

That’s exactly how it played out.

The Roush Fenway Racing duo of Brad Keselowski and Chris Buescher battled the Team Penske trio of Austin Cindric, Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano lap-after-lap to close out the second stage on Lap 160. The problem for them was, rain was forecasted to come within the next 15-20 minutes. They didn’t feel like they had enough gas to get them to that point.

So, most of the leaders pit on the Lap 160 stage break. Those that pit on Lap 124 stayed out hopeful for weather to come into play before the scheduled distance.

Allmendinger, Michael McDowell, Jones, Byron, Suarez, Gilliland, Yeley, Stenhouse Jr., Custer, Busch and Ty Dillon stayed out. Bubba Wallace, Martin Truex Jr., Erik Jones, Buescher, Aric Almirola and Tyler Reddick took two tires. Everyone else took four.

It took six laps before Byron passed Allmendinger for the top spot on Lap 166. 11 laps later, Wallace, Custer and Stenhouse Jr. crashed in Turn 3. That brought out the seventh and final caution.

While under yellow, rain began to fall. It would fall harder and harder to where the 1.54-mile track was lost and the race deemed over.

On a night that saw most of the front runners all being winless on the season, Byron scores a series leading fourth win in 19 races run instead. Suarez finished second while Allmendinger, McDowell and Busch rounded out the top five.

“We went through so much throughout the night, spinning through the infield, destroyed the bottom of the car dragging it around the apron trying to stay on the lead lap,” said Byron. “At that point you just don’t have the grip, so I was real edgy back in traffic.

“Rudy made a good call to pit there and then stay out, and once we got towards the front it was okay. We could honestly make the right decisions, block okay, and got the lead from AJ and just was able to manage the run.

“Just a crazy night.”

Byron Equals Amount Of Wins This Season Than He Had Entering

There’s no doubt about it, even with stealing a win, William Bryon is in my opinion the championship front runner. The Hendrick Motorsports driver now has as many wins this season (19 races) as he had in his previous 180 starts.

We’ve been waiting for this type of breakout from the 25-year-old North Carolina native. It took him 97 races before scoring his first career win in the 2020 regular season finale. He’d go winless throughout the playoffs however.

Then in only the third race of the 2021 season, he won again. Unfortunately for him, that was his lone trip to victory lane.

Last year, he finally broke out and won multiple races in a season. He’d win 2 of the first 8 races including here that spring. Again, those were his only wins. He’d go winless over the final 28 races. In fact, after his win, he went the rest of the regular season (18 races) without a top five. He had one top 10 in that span which was only a ninth place run. It was 21 races between top five finishes.

As good as he was early, he faltered after.

That’s why I was skeptical when he began 2023 with two wins in four races including both in-a-row. Out of the first six races, he had two wins and three total top five finishes. His other three results were 34th, 25th and 32nd respectively.

Who was Byron going to become in 2023?

He’s shown enough now for me to say he’s going to potentially become a champion.

Yes, through nine races those three top fives early in the season were his only ones. However, since that point, Byron has figured it out.

7th, 4th, 3rd, 1st, 2nd, 8th, 14th, 6th, 13th and now 1st are his results over the last 10 races. He’s led almost as many laps this season (742) as he did all of last (746).

“Yeah, it’s really important,” Byron said of this summer run. “We’re just keeping our heads in it. Over the last few weeks, we’d finish in the top 15 when we don’t have good cars, and the days we have really good cars we finish in the top 5.

“It’s just a matter of staying with it, and today was definitely a lucky break. I can’t overstate that. We were in the lead, but certainly a lot of laps to go.

“But just thankful for a good team to make good decisions, and like I said, to stay in the race when it’s easy to kind of give up and pack it in.”

8 stage wins and now 4 wins gives him 22 playoff points heading into Loudon next Sunday. Kyle Busch is next best with 17. Kyle Larson (12), Martin Truex Jr. (11) and Ross Chastain (10) are the only other two in double digits.

Byron is on his way to a Championship 4 berth at this point and if he can truly get there, he led 64 laps and was first and second respectively in the pair of stages to go along with a win at Phoenix. That’s the site of this year’s final round again.

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Suarez, Allmendinger McDowell Stretch Fuel To Score Massive Points Days, Bowman In Trouble

Daniel Suarez (-6), Michael McDowell (-10) and AJ Allmendinger (-24) each entered the night below the playoff cutline. 2 of the 3 leave above it.

With Bubba Wallace being collected in a crash late and Ty Gibbs being collected in the Lap 122 caution, it helped both Suarez (2nd place) Allmendinger (3rd place) and McDowell (4th place) to make up a ton of ground.

Both Suarez and McDowell are each tied now for 15th in points with 307 points accumulated Wallace falls from 15 points up to 3 points down. Allmendinger is next up in 18th (-13). Gibbs falls to 19th (-26).

For Suarez, he qualified only 26th and didn’t score a single stage point (19th, 17th). That pit call on Lap 124 helped him. While now having track position for the first time all night, his No. 99 Chevy was flying. Suarez rode in Byron’s shadow hoping to find a path by. Then the rain hit.

“I wish I had one more shot at it,” he said. “With that being said, I had two cars in third and fourth, they also needed to win. If they could pick somebody to help, it wasn’t going to be me.”

McDowell started 20th and scored six total stage points, three in each stage, with 8th place finishes in both. He went even longer than the rest with rolling the dice to not only stay out on Lap 124, but he didn’t pit on Lap 160 either. He was hopeful for the rain to come before his engine sputtered.

He got lucky and it did. McDowell went from Lap 98 until the early finish on Lap 185 without pitting. That gamble has him into the playoffs at the moment.

“Obviously, that pit road incident with Martin took us out of the track position we needed, so we had to get a little bit creative there. I’m thankful to be able to recover, but really wish I’d have held those guys off at the end. We had a shot on that restart, obviously, starting on the front row. I thought I executed the start pretty well, but just couldn’t quite get clear of AJ (Allmendinger) like I needed to, but it didn’t work out. We were close, though.”

Allmendinger was 12th and 5th respectively in the two stages netting him six stage points too. He noted that his car struggled to lead due to the setup.

“We had a race car that handled really well. Probably didn’t lead very well. We probably had a little bit too much drag in it. But we kind of had that idea that we came with handling, so once I got to the lead I couldn’t really defend because they would get such big runs, but we could stay up front.”

Wallace went from 37th to 17th in Stage 1 and up to sixth (5 stage points) in Stage 2. That crash in the end while running well inside of the top 10 cost him dearly.

Gibbs qualified 7th but didn’t have a single stage point in being 11th and 34th in them.

Alex Bowman also fell further back and is in serious trouble now. He was -26 entering and -44 leaving. For the second straight week, he and Denny Hamlin were involved in an incident when Bowman lost control of his No. 48 Chevrolet in Turn 4 on Lap 154. He’d finish 26th as a result. It was his ninth straight finish outside the top 10. That’s why he’s spiraled from the points lead early down to 22nd now.

Yes, missing three races to injury didn’t help. Neither did that big penalty from Richmond. Still, being 29th, 11th and 13th before his injury and 12th, 26th, 15th, 17th, 37th and now 26th after is why despite six top eight finishes in the first seven races has him in the position that he’s in.

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SHR Falters

SHR has had a tough start to the season. They’re winless still. However, they had higher hopes entering the night. With all four cars rolling off 13th or better, including 3 of the top 6 starters, they’d nab just two total stage points with race finishes of 18th-22nd-24th-30th.

Pole sitter Aric Almirola led two times for 46 laps including the first 39. But, he was shuffled out towards the end of the opening stage to only finish 10th. With being 14th in Stage 2 and 18th in the end, he made up no ground in points.

Similar for Chase Briscoe. He started third but dropped 20 spots in the first 60 laps to finish 23rd at the end of Stage 1. He was 24th in Stage 2 and 22nd at race completion.

Ryan Preece started 13th but was 25th and 10th in the two stages and collected in the final crash to finish 24th.

Kevin Harvick in his final Atlanta start struggled with handling and went from 6th to 29th at the end of Stage 1. He was collected in two incidents in Stage 2 and would finish 30th in the end.

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Great Race For Chicago Follow Up

Sunday night, albeit rain shortened, was a phenomenal show to witness for being the first race after the inaugural Chicago street race. 18 lead changes among 12 drivers with countless side-by-side laps clicking by was everything that was needed to be to show those new fans some excitement.

I was pleased with how Atlanta looked and have to feel that if those new fans tuned in, they would have been too.

While I get the notion that a rain shortened race feels like it robbed us of a great finish, it was the right call by NASCAR to end this race early.

Atlanta delivered and being under the lights on a Sunday instead of a Saturday night, or even Sunday afternoon, just felt right.

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Ford Leads The Laps, Chevy Gets The Win…Again

Relatively speaking, the 2023 season has been slim pickings for Ford drivers. Joey Logano won at Atlanta Motor Speedway in the fifth race of the season, and Ryan Blaney picked up an intermediate speedway victory in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte.

That’s the sum total of wins for the Ford camp entering this weekend—compared with 11 for Chevrolet and five for Toyota.

Ford qualified 1-6 on Saturday evening. That came after them having the top 8 starting spots this past spring. Was this going to be their night?

Ford’s led 221 of the 260 laps and took home the top two spots and 3 of the top 7. That equaled the amount of laps led the first four weeks of the season too (221).

In fact, coming into Sunday’s race, Ford had led the most laps in all three drafting tracks this season. They led 122 of 212 laps in Daytona, 221 of 260 laps here and 88 of 196 in Talladega. 

Once again, they led the most laps at 145 of 185 on Sunday.

That’s 576 of 853 (67.5%) of all laps led on these tracks by the blue ovals. When equating that to the rest of the season, Ford’s have led 1,289 laps all year. That’s 44.6% of their laps led all year coming on these three tracks. 

They led nine or fewer laps in a race in five of the last eight including one at Sonoma, two in Nashville and 0 in Chicago the last three races. 

With dominating in Atlanta again, they still didn’t win. Chevy did.

Chevy is now 3-for-4 this year on superspeedway’s and went 5-for-6 last year. However, even being 3-for-4 this year, they led the least amount of laps among the manufacturers in two of them. 

They led a combined 137 laps on these tracks this season but won three races. By comparison, Toyota has led 141. 

Chevy led 44 laps in Daytona, trailing Toyota’s 46 too. For here, they led 19 laps, Toyota led 20. In ‘Dega, they led 43 laps compared to Toyota’s 65. On Sunday night, they led 31 laps and Toyota 10.

Ford’s are leading, Chevy’s are winning and Toyota’s are just there.

Back in March however, Toyota’s actually had 3 of the top 6 finishers which was a far better finish than we’d have expected out of them. We all figured they’d struggle that weekend, especially after qualifying on Saturday. Just one Toyota even made the final round of qualifying with them starting 10-14-16-19-29-35.

Plus, they’ve won just twice in the Peachtree state and have failed to reach victory lane there since 2014. They’re 2-for-the-last-18 in Talladega and 1 for the last 8 at Daytona.

For Chevy, Hendrick Motorsports has won 3 of the 4 Atlanta races under this drafting package.