William Byron Has Mastered the Art of the Opportunistic Win
In winning his second straight Daytona 500, Byron showed that being in the right place at the right time isn’t an accident — it’s a skill.
Sunday’s Daytona 500 had a bit of all the classic elements we’ve come to expect from the Great American Race — pomp and circumstance, long weather delays, big wrecks, and a win belonging to the driver who barely managed to slip through the chaos and leave a pile of crashed cars behind him.
That winner, William Byron, is no stranger to victory lane at Daytona — he won here a year ago as well, making him just the fifth driver to ever win NASCAR’s biggest race in back-to-back seasons:
Another thing Byron is no stranger to? Making a last-second pass to win a race that he hadn’t previously dominated.
In our weekly NASCAR podcast, Podracing, my co-host Tyler Lauletta and I always jokingly call Byron “The Vulture”, because our first season of the show (2023) was filled with cases of him winning races that others had arguably deserved to win more. That season alone — which was a weird one for Byron in general — saw him lead all drivers in wins (with 6), but either not lead the field in laps led or Driver Rating in four of those races. He “vultured” wins in that manner away from teammate Kyle Larson (at Phoenix), Martin Truex, Jr. (Darlington), either Aric Almirola or Ryan Blaney (Atlanta) and Bubba Wallace (Texas). Based on Driver Rating, we would have expected Byron to only win 0.85 of those races on average, not all four.
Byron continued that trend at Daytona last year, leading only the final four laps (out of 200) to grab the victory. Later in the season at Darlington, he only led the final two laps en route to the win, and on Sunday he wasn’t even technically credited for leading the final lap because his winning pass (as everyone else wrecked out) came so late.
We might think all of this points to a lucky driver who repeatedly flukes his way to victory. And certainly, luck played a role — as it does at all restrictor-plate tracks. But the remarkable thing is that Byron might also be the best statistical driver in the Cup Series.
Over the previous three seasons, only Larson (98.5) has a higher average per-race Driver Rating than Byron (95.7), and Byron’s Adjusted Points+ Index of 187 — i.e., 87 percent better than average — leads all drivers (Larson is second at 172). If Byron is a master vulture, he has earned that status by also mastering the art of being in the right place at the right time. (In that sense, he might be the NASCAR version of the Kansas City Chiefs, who just kept winning one-score games throughout the 2024 NFL season.)
So much of success in NASCAR is about putting yourself in a position to win late — especially as restarts and overtimes have become more and more prevalent at the endings of races. And perhaps nowhere is that skill more important than at Daytona, where surviving the Big One and simply being in the mix at the end will always give you a chance.
I wrote a year ago, when Byron won the first time, that it was rare to see NASCAR’s best driver actually win the Daytona 500 — an irony, given how prestigious the race is from a historical perspective. But now it’s happened twice in a row, and it’s no coincidence.
Byron is probably the best driver in the sport when it comes to setting up those late-race opportunities for himself, and then capitalizing on them, so it’s fitting that he etched his name into some impressive Daytona record books the same way he’s won all those races before: By waiting patiently, lurking in the perfect position and swooping in at exactly the right moment to snatch the biggest prize of them all.
Filed under: NASCAR