NASCAR’s Best Driver Just Won the Daytona 500. That Doesn’t Usually Happen.
NASCAR’s Best Driver Just Won the Daytona 500. That Doesn’t Usually Happen.
William Byron, this year's winner, is No. 1 in my new NASCAR Cup Series driver rankings.
The 2024 Daytona 500, like many other Great American Races before it, ended in a chaotic mess. Already postponed by a day due to weather, the race saw a huge portion of its field knocked out by multiple late wrecks, with the victory decided through an unsatisfying technicality — which driver was ahead when the yellow flag for the final caution came out.
But the one thing fans couldn’t complain about was the quality of the winner. William Byron, driving the No. 24 of Hendrick Motorsports, was arguably the best driver of the 2023 season — with apologies to champ Ryan Blaney — and he just won the Super Bowl of Motorsports to kick off the 2024 schedule. Including Monday’s result, Byron shows up as No. 1 in the first edition of my 2024 NASCAR driver ratings:
🏁 2024 NASCAR Cup Series driver ratings 🚗
What’s the big deal, you might be asking — what’s so weird about NASCAR’s best driver winning its most prestigious race? The best golfers and (especially) tennis players, for instance, win the top tournaments all the time. Shouldn’t this be expected?
Well, auto racing isn’t exactly like those other sports. And that’s especially the case at a restrictor-plate track like Daytona. While not every Daytona 500 is going to yield an out-of-nowhere winner like Ricky Stenhouse Jr. last season (or Austin Cindric the year before), the track’s propensity for huge wrecks and general chaos means more of a chance for random winners — and lower odds for top drivers.
(It’s probably no coincidence that Dale Earnhardt Sr. needed 20 tries before winning his first Daytona 500, or that Kyle Busch still hasn’t won one yet.)
We can see this play out in the stats. Among Cup Series tracks to host at least 10 races since 1973,1 Daytona’s races — including both the 500 and the midseason night race — have yielded the worst group of winners based on their average Pts+ from the previous season:
Byron, though, was one of the best Daytona 500 winners based to his performance in the previous season. While he wasn’t exactly Jeff Gordon winning in 1999, coming off an epic season of 13 wins and 28 Top 10s in 33 races, Byron won 6 races — easily the most of any driver — and was a fixture at the front of the field week in and week out. He would have won the championship in NASCAR’s pre-playoff era, just based on season-long points.
That makes Byron a fitting winner on the sport’s grandest stage, even if the way it played out was filled with plenty of classic Daytona chaos.
Filed under: NASCAR
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