The general consensus is that it will take a top-three seed to contend for the NASCAR Cup Series championship come the start of the Chase for the Championship so is William Byron the least bit concerned with 13th through three races?
Drivers talk about it.
“Yeah, it’s funny. (Christopher) Bell and I were talking about this at driver intros last week,” said Byron during a Friday press conference. “It just feels like the longer we do this, the more it takes a few races to kind of get into the meat of the season and what really makes up our season and the tracks.
“So, for me, it’s felt super long this year just kind of getting into the rhythm of the season. I don’t want to classify it as a ‘real racetrack’, but these places that really make up the finesse and the speed that it takes to win a championship.”
To his point, when the season begins with a superspeedway, a superintermediate and a road course, it’s fair to say that the season doesn’t really begin until this month with a short track in Phoenix, intermediate in Las Vegas and whatever we want to classify Darlington as these days.
With that said, Byron would most certainly prefer to be in the top-five after three races instead of outside the top-10 because even with this playoff format, every race has consequence.
“To answer your question on where we stand, I think what’s frustrating for us is feeling like we’ve given up a few points the last couple weeks,” Byron said. “You know, I crashed the week before at Atlanta. We had some damage, and then I crashed, and so that gave away a handful. And then last week, I felt like we gave away a handful at the end there in the last run.
“I just feel like those sting a little more than they used to probably … Our goal last year was to win the regular season championship, and we got off to a good start and made that a little bit easier. But, yeah, we’ve just been kind of middle of the road right now. We’ve scored 25-26 points on average. We’d like to score, you know, 35 to 40 on average. So definitely below average right now, but I think we’re going to see what we have this weekend, that’s for sure.”
His pursuit of a regular season championship has been even further challenged by Tyler Reddick opening the season with three consecutive victories. For one, three wins is generally considered the average good season and it’s the same number Byron won overall last year.
Additionally, wins count for 15 more points this year so Reddick has almost a race and a half advantage over second place teammate Bubba Wallace. Byron is over two full wins worth of points behind Reddick.
“Yeah, I mean look — they’ve hit a home run on two drafting tracks,” Byron said. “To score the points that they did is phenomenal. If you start the year and you say, man, if we could score 40 to 50 points on drafting tracks, that’s going to be a huge advantage.
“So they’ve accumulated a big advantage in those drafting tracks. And then COTA, I don’t think was any surprise to me that Tyler ran so well. But they executed really well, and that momentum was big. So I think for us on the 24 team, it’s not really about looking at anyone else. It’s looking at ourselves. If we get to race 26 and that gap is still there, then shoot, you know, wish we could have had a couple things back.
“But there’s so much circumstance in those first couple weeks that you’ve got 26 weeks to figure it out. I think there’s going to be plenty of ebb and flow in the next, I don’t know, 20-22 weeks.”
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