After a tough outing this past weekend at Talladega Superspeedway, William Byron, the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series regular-season champion, finds himself in a very difficult position heading to the final elimination event of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, at Martinsville Speedway.

With a 36-point deficit to the cutline, it’ll likely take a victory by the Charlotte, North Carolina-native in Sunday’s XFINITY 500 at the half-mile paperclip to ensure that Byron advances to the Championship 4 for a third consecutive chance at hoisting the Bill France Cup.

After spending the vast majority of Sunday’s 500-miler riding towards the tail-end of the lead draft, Byron was able to surge to the front, putting himself in position to compete for a victory that would advance him to the Championship Race. However, after restarting on the front row in NASCAR Overtime, things kind of went haywire on the final lap.

RACE RESULTS: 2025 YellaWood 500 at Talladega

With half a lap remaining, Byron was second on the inside lane behind teammate Kyle Larson when the No. 5 Chevrolet ran out of fuel, killing the momentum of the inside line, and allowing several people on the outside (including eventual race-winner Chase Briscoe) to get to the head of the field.

That ended his shot at the victory, but things got even worse for Byron in the tri-oval, when a bad bump from Chevrolet teammate Carson Hocevar got the No. 24 Raptor Chevrolet sideways and turned around in the tri-oval, taking a potential top-five result and turning it into a disappointing 25th.

“Certainly a finish would have helped us get a little bit closer on the points side of things. We just lost control of the race. We just couldn’t get the pushes going the way we needed to on the bottom lane. We got the outside lane clear down in front of us, and then the No. 5 [Kyle Larson] ran out of fuel there on the backstretch and that kind of broke up the energy a little bit more,” Byron said. “We just couldn’t get it linked back together. It was just wrong place, wrong time. I felt like we were in a good spot where I was on the bottom, but we just couldn’t get linked up.”

While that 20-point swing in the final hundred yards of Sunday’s event wasn’t going to have Byron sitting above the cutline — especially with Chase Briscoe going to Victory Lane — but it would have opened up several more options for the 27-year-old come Sunday’s XFINITY 500 at Martinsville.

PLAYOFF GRID: 2025 NCS YellaWood 500 at Talladega

“I think, overall, gave it our best effort,” Byron said. “We were tight there on fuel, so just trying to manage that, and then we just got spun out there coming to the line.”

Byron is a two-time race-winner in the NASCAR Cup Series at Martinsville Speedway, but both of those triumphs came during the track’s Spring event. In the Fall, the last two years have been a heck of a grind for the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet just to get themselves a half-decent finish and advance on further in the post-season.

Last Fall, Byron’s struggles at Martinsville led to some contreversy in the closing laps of the event, with a bunch of team manipulation penalties coming after the penultimate event of the season in 2024 — however, the points worked out in the favor of Byron over Christopher Bell.

“It looks like we’ve got to win. It looks like all of the guys below the [cutline] have to win, so we just have to go there and do that. We’ve had two strong weeks but no results and we just gotta go there and try to do the best we can.”

After the incident coming to pit road at Las Vegas, and a last-lap spin at Talladega, It’s going to be an all-or-nothing weekend for Byron at the half-mile paperclip, and will require the 15-time NASCAR Cup Series race-winner to leave Virginia on Sunday as a 16-time NASCAR Cup Series race-winner.

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