William Byron leads a podium sweep for Hendrick Motorsports at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the NASCAR Cup Series Pennzoil 400.
LAS VEGAS—William Byron won the most important race of Sunday afternoon—by inches off pit road.
Leading a Podium Sweep for Hendrick Motorsports, William Byron Wins at Las Vegas
Quick work by Byron’s pit crew enabled the driver of the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet to beat teammate Kyle Larson off pit road for an overtime restart in the Pennzoil 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, and that was the decisive factor in Byron’s fifth career NASCAR Cup Series victory.
When Aric Almirola spun into the fourth turn wall with four laps left of a scheduled 267, the race turned upside down. Larson held a two-second lead at that point and appeared the almost certain winner.
After NASCAR called the fourth and final caution, Martin Truex Jr. stayed on the track, with Byron, Larson and most of the other contenders pitting for two tires. Byron’s crew was a fraction of a second faster on the stop, and Byron claimed a front-row starting spot for the overtime to Truex’s outside.
On the first overtime lap, Byron surged past Truex as the cars entered the third turn at the 1.5-mile track and pulled away to win by 0.622 seconds over Larson and 0.766 seconds over teammate Alex Bowman. It was the third time Hendrick Motorsports had finished one-two-three in a Cup Series event.
Hendrick Motorsports Driver Chase Elliott Watches from Home
The drivers accomplished the feat with their fourth driver, Chase Elliott, watching from North Carolina with team owner Rick Hendrick. Elliott broke his left tibia in a snowboarding accident in Colorado on Friday and will miss multiple races as he recovers from surgery.
Josh Berry, substituting for Elliott, finished 29th, two laps down, in his first race with NASCAR’s Next-Gen car.
“Yeah, just been really confident about the group of guys that I have on this 24 team,” said Byron, who led 176 of 271 laps, swept the first two stages, and won for the first time at Las Vegas. “They work extremely hard, and we spent a lot of time in the offseason just going through running at the sim (simulator) with Chevy and running on iRacing and just trying to get better as a race car driver and as a team.
“Thinking of Chase back home. Wish he was out here with us. He’s a great race car driver, great teammate. Wish he was out here.”
The Pennzoil 400 Results
For the overtime restart, Larson chose the inside lane behind Truex and was bottled up behind the No. 19 Toyota. But Larson acknowledged the race was lost on pit road.
“Damn,” Larson said with a wry laugh. “It’s just part of Cup racing. It seems like kind of laps down, lap by lap, and then, sure enough, the yellow lights come on. You’ve just got to get over that and then try to execute a good pit stop, and I thought I did a really good job getting to my sign, and getting to the commitment line.
“I had a gap to William behind me, and their pit crew must have just done a really good job and got out in front of us, and that gave up the front row. I knew I was in trouble with the 19 staying out. I felt like William was going to get by him.
“Yeah, just a bummer that we didn’t end up the winner, but all in all, William probably had a little bit better car than I had today, and their pit crew executed when they needed to there at the end.”
In the overtime scramble, Toyota drivers Bubba Wallace finished fourth and Christopher Bell fifth. Austin Cindric, who had been lapped at one point, recovered to run sixth as the top-finishing Ford driver. Truex, Justin Haley, Kevin Harvick, and Daniel Suarez completed the top ten.
The NASCAR Cup Series Point Standings
In a race that featured 13 lead changes among eight drivers, Larson took the top spot on lap 196, after restarting third behind Denny Hamlin and Bowman on lap 190. The 2021 series champion extended his advantage to nearly five seconds over Byron during an exchange of green-flag pit stops before Almirola’s accident caused the fourth caution on lap 263.
Byron had cut Larson’s lead to two seconds before the accident forced overtime.
The first caution for an on-track incident didn’t occur until lap 183, nine laps after the final stage went green. The pole winner Joey Logano, Brad Keselowski, and Kyle Busch were racing three wide through the fourth turn when disaster struck.
With Keselowski’s No. 6 Ford in the middle, Logano ran out of room to the outside, and after contact with Keselowski’s car, Logano’s No. 22 Ford bounced off the wall and spun into the infield grass.
Logano brought his car to pit road, but his crew couldn’t repair the Ford before the seven-minute time limit ran out under NASCAR’s damaged vehicle policy.
Asked whether Keselowski pinched him into the corner, Logano replied, “Yeah, he did. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it. It is what it is. What are you going to do, right? We got fenced.”
Next Up
The NASCAR Cup Series completes its West Coast Swing next weekend at Phoenix Raceway in the United Rentals Work United 500 on Sunday, March 12th at 3:30 pm ET. Coverage is on FOX, MRN, and SiriusXM.