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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
After spending the vast majority of Sunday\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
RACE RESULTS:<\/strong> 2025 YellaWood 500 at Talladega<\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n