Sunday night at Darlington Raceway, William Byron stood on pit road like a man who’d spent three hours building a sandcastle only to have the tide come in and wash it all away—while Denny Hamlin celebrated in the background like he’d built it himself. Byron didn’t look angry. He didn’t look defeated. He looked stunned. Because what just happened out there wasn’t supposed to happen.
This was his race. And it slipped through his fingers.
Byron, who conquered the Lady in Black back in 2023, came into this year’s Goodyear 400 with a sledgehammer and a checklist. And by all accounts, he was ticking off every box like a man on a mission. Win the pole? Check. Sweep the stages? Check. Lead nearly every single lap and make the rest of the field look like background noise? Big check.
In fact, through most of the race, it wasn’t even close. He led 243 of the 290 laps run. Two hundred. Forty. Three. That’s not a race—that’s a clinic. A coronation. And for a brief moment, it felt like we were witnessing something historic. The kind of run you bring up in arguments about who’s got the rawest talent in the sport. Think Bill Elliott in ’88, when he led 107 laps at Darlington. Or Jeff Burton leading every single lap at New Hampshire in 2000. Only this was going to be even more ridiculous.
And then it wasn’t.
“We had a great Chevy all race long,” Byron said. “We just needed control of the race there under green and we lost that with the pit sequence. The No. 45 (Tyler Reddick) went really short. We lost a few spots under the green flag sequence, and that was the difference. We had a decent run that time.”
That “difference” was everything. Because once the green flag pit stops jumbled the order and took away Byron’s stranglehold on the lead, it was like a game of musical chairs—but with 3,500-pound race cars doing 170 mph.
And as fate would have it, the race didn’t end clean. With ten laps to go, the eighth and final caution flew, and from there it was NASCAR’s version of a demolition derby. Byron, Bell, and Reddick went three-wide on the overtime restart—and Hamlin, ever the opportunist, saw the chaos brewing and tiptoed through the mess like a man sneaking out of a bar fight with everyone else’s wallet.
“The No. 20 (Christopher Bell) did a good job kind of air blocking and just keeping us behind him. It took me a long time to get by him,” Byron said. And by the time he did? Hamlin was gone.
Gone like smoke in the wind.
“We had a great pit stop there at the end and was able to line up on the second row,” Byron said. “We just needed the front row to have a shot to win here.
“It stings to be this close, but at the same time, I’m really proud of that effort by the whole team. It shows what we’re really made of, and hopefully there’s a lot more of that to come.”
But the real story here isn’t the guy who won. It’s the guy who should have.
Byron was untouchable for most of the race. While others were fighting their cars, fighting the track, and fighting each other, he was in another time zone. So what was going through his head as he carved up the field like Sunday roast?
“Just try not to screw it up, right? Just try to explain what my balance was in clean air, and it just changed a little bit,” he said. “I felt like we were in position to have a perfect race there. That would have been pretty damn impressive. It sucks, but nobody is at fault. Those guys could be aggressive on the other side of us and it was turning into a big strategy play. We just couldn’t keep control.”
And that’s Darlington for you. It giveth and it taketh away. It’ll make you feel like a god for 400 miles and then throw a wrench at your head in the final 10.
Byron didn’t screw it up. He was nearly perfect. But NASCAR isn’t about perfect. It’s about being perfect when it counts. And this time, through no real fault of his own, William Byron came up a lap short on a race he’d already won in everything but the box score.
But if there’s any justice in this sport, Darlington owes him one.
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.