A year ago, William Byron was the story of the NASCAR season. He held a comfortable lead atop the standings and went on to win the regular-season championship. Now, with just four races remaining before the Playoffs, the Hendrick Motorsports driver sits 12th, is winless in 22 races, and the question everyone in the garage has been wondering has finally been said out loud.
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“William Byron has not had back-to-back top 10s since March,” Steve Letarte said in a snippet of Inside the Race shared on social media ahead of its latest episode release. “It’s hard to be considered a real contender when you can’t run in the front 25% of the field on a weekly basis.”
Kyle Petty’s concern, meanwhile, wasn’t result-centric but more about what happens when things go sideways.
“When a misstep happens, they don’t have the speed or make the right calls to recover,” Petty said in the same clip. “They just disappear. How do they get to 13th? Why are they running there?”
For Byron, the numbers have not been kind. He was seen as a championship favorite heading into last year’s playoffs, but this season couldn’t be further from that. Four top fives, nine top 10s, three DNFs, and an average finish of 15.8.
He will make The Chase, as he’s 88 points clear of the cut line heading into the Iowa Corn 350 this Sunday. And that’s mission accomplished. What happens afterward is another story altogether.
The warning signs have been there for a while. At Chicagoland over the Fourth of July weekend, Byron looked set to end the drought. He swept both stages and had control of the race, only for a late pit strategy call to hand Joe Gibbs Racing’s Chase Briscoe the advantage. Byron had to settle for fourth.
Things only got worse after that. At Bristol, he started from the back, never really found any pace, and finished 30th, five laps down. Then, in his 300th Cup start at Watkins Glen, contact with Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney broke his toe link, forcing a lengthy trip to the garage and leaving him 36th.
No wins means no Chase bonus points. One bad race, and the season is over. The entire problem, however, cannot be pinned on Byron. It’s a Hendrick Motorsports problem, and beneath that, a Chevrolet problem.
Right before Daytona, Chevrolet rolled out a redesigned nose for the Camaro ZL1. In one move, years of setup data became far less useful. Nobody had simulation numbers for it, and teams that had spent seasons learning exactly how their cars behaved were suddenly starting over from scratch. The result? Chevrolet didn’t win a race through the first six events of 2026.
For Rick Hendrick’s team driver, Byron specifically, the damage comes up every Saturday. The No. 24 unloads with a setup that is already off, spends Friday night guessing at fixes, and qualifies around 15th or worse. Starting in traffic means no early-stage points, more exposure to accidents, and less margin for error when strategy decisions go wrong.
Byron’s teammates are not in a great position themselves. Defending Cup Series champion Kyle Larson has been winless for over a year. Chase Elliott lost momentum over the summer. After winning early at Martinsville and then Texas, he entered a three-month slump without a single top-five finish.
Byron, Larson, and Elliott will all be in The Chase. But as Petty and Letarte pointed out while discussing Byron specifically, simply making the playoffs and making a serious championship run are two very different things right now.