William Byron mentioned on Saturday that it was nice to know that he was battling just one driver in Sunday’s Bank of America ROVAL 400…himself.

“It’s definitely us against ourselves,” said Byron, who leads the series with six victories, the most recent of which—at Texas Motor Speedway—has propelled him into the Playoffs’ Round of 8.

“I feel like it’s us executing races. It’s us putting together good performances… top five performances that we know that we’re capable of.”

The Texas win allowed Byron to concentrate on trying to maintain momentum in Sunday’s elimination race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

“For us, it’s definitely going to be less stress,” said Byron, who started 14^th in the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. “But once we get to the race track, we’re trying to win the race, so it’ll be stressful because of that.

Byron, played the strategy right pitting before each of the two stages ended. He was 14th in Stage 1 and 13th in Stage 2. It’s why he had track position for the final stage and despite restarting on Row 2 for the final restart with 10 to go, he took advantage of Kyle Busch spinning his tires to get to second.

Byron then set his sights on battling AJ Allmendinger for the win, but Allmendinger was just that much better. The North Carolina native had to settle for a runner-up.

“Yeah, just one final run to get within a car length there,” said Byron. “The air buffer is kind of tough there with three to four car lengths, but once you get within one you can kind of manipulate his car a little bit. I was just hoping for that.

“But he’s obviously great here and great at all the road courses. I had that one shot with probably eight to go. He did a good job blocking the chicane there and he didn’t miss his marks, and it was too early to make a dive bomb move.

“Just proud of the whole team, the Z by HP Camaro was awesome. We definitely improved a lot as the race went on. Good to have Z by HP on the car, a new partner for us, so that was really fun. But yeah, just good momentum.”

It was his 4th top 11 finish in 5 tries on the ROVAL but the first in the top 5. It was his 3rd top 5 on road courses in 2023 which further extended his advantage in the points for road courses leaving him P1 in the end on them.

He takes with him momentum into the third round. This is the second straight year that he’s been in this position which this time he’s hopeful to advance out of it.

Byron finished 1st, 2nd, 2nd in this round and if you got back to Watkins Glen, he has an average finishing position of 5.25. He’s finished 1st, 8th, 4th, 15th, 9th, 1st, 2nd, 2nd in that span.

“We’ve got to keep it rolling,” he says. “I’d like to do one-two-two in the next round. That would be ideal, but keep performing where we want to be.”