William Byron Is Having One Of NASCAR's Weirdest Seasons
William Byron Is Having One Of NASCAR's Weirdest Seasons
Some weeks, he dominates. Others, he finishes in the back of the field.
I’ve written before about the dominant start Hendrick Motorsports has gotten off to this season, and they’ve added another W since then — Kyle Larson’s victory at Richmond last Sunday, his team’s third win of the year in the Cup Series’ seven total races to date.
The other two belong to William Byron, making him 2023’s only multi-time winner in the series so far. Two wins is a good benchmark under NASCAR’s current postseason system because it locks a driver into the playoffs, meaning Byron is basically playing with house money the rest of the season. And based on the quality of those wins — where Byron led 240 out of a possible 588 laps (41%) and averaged a sky-high 139.8 driver rating — it’s hard to argue his status is undeserved.
However, if all you saw were the rest of Byron’s results, you might not realize you were looking at NASCAR’s top winner. Aside from finishing fifth from the pole at COTA, Byron hasn’t ended up any better than 24th in any other race this season, averaging a mediocre-to-poor finish of 28.8 in those events.
As a result, he’s having one of the weirdest Jekyll-and-Hyde seasons in Cup Series history. Among multi-time winners in a single season, Byron’s average finish of 24.0 in non-wins is tracking to be the third-worst since 1972, trailing only Jimmy Spencer (who scored only two Top 10s outside of his wins) in 1994 and Ward Burton (who had only six non-win Top 10s) in 2002.
If Byron can grab another win, he would leapfrog Geoff Bodine’s 1994 and the late Neil Bonnett’s 1979 in the realm of all-or-nothing three-win campaigns. Both of those drivers suffered from extreme reliability issues, with numerous races ending in blown engines, ignition failures and steering failures. By comparison, Byron has crashed a few times, but car reliability generally isn’t an issue while driving for Hendrick.
The irony of Byron’s inconsistent, multi-win season is that teammate Alex Bowman is having an incredibly consistent year despite not having actually won yet. He leads all drivers in standings points and average finish, and ranks second behind Kyle Busch (82.1%) in composite winning percentage (77.9%). But Bowman is only +2000 to win the championship — compared with +800 for Byron — in part because NASCAR’s playoff system has fully bought into Ricky Bobby’s wisdom: “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
In all fairness, Byron’s season wouldn’t look nearly so up-and-down if he’d managed to hang onto the late lead he briefly held at Richmond last weekend. (He was first as deep into the race as lap 375, but got turned sideways by Christopher Bell on a restart and tumbled to 24th in the final running order.) But that’s racin’ for ya — and it’s all part of why this season is tracking to be one of the weirdest in Cup Series history.
Filed under: NASCAR