By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
William Byron left Daytona International Speedway Sunday night singing a tune similar to that of most of the field: “If we could have only avoided that darn wreck.”
Byron, who started his first Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race in Sunday’s Daytona 500 in the famed No. 24 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports, planned to take it easy in the opening stages of the 200-lap race.
However, the trouble found him on lap 61 when Daniel Suarez crashed hard in Turn 2, swallowing up Erik Jones, Jimmie Johnson and others. Byron, 20, avoided day-ending damage by spinning his car into the wreck, but it affected the drafting ability from then forward.
“You always know going in that it’s going to be that way,” Byron said. “If we could have avoided that first wreck when the No. 17 [Ricky Stenhouse Jr.] got sideways and the No. 20 [Jones] wrecked, I felt we had a good shot.”
Hanging in small lines of cars for a majority of the race, Byron also suffered two flat tires, the first sending Byron into the wall mid-race and the second causing a spin to bring out the race’s penultimate caution on lap 191. Despite the triple-trouble day, Byron managed to still finish, coming home 23rd, four laps down.
Seeing all the laps, Byron said the intensity is what startled him most following is first Cup race.
“In the first half, there was a lot of riding,” he said. “The first 15 to 30 laps, no real moves and that was a good time to make up some ground. After that, the intensity picked exponentially, and once it got single-file, we just couldn’t make it work with our damage. We could have hanged on to the back of the pack if they stayed double-wide.”
Byron still leaves Daytona with a few mental notes for Talladega Superspeedway in a few months.
“I’ll learn from it, I know what I need for next time,” he said. “Overall, we learned the race procedure and how to make it 500 miles.”
In a roller coaster of an afternoon, the defending XFINITY Series champion is more than ready to hit the next chapter of his rookie Cup campaign. Very ready.
“I can’t wait, I want to get to a racetrack… tomorrow,” he said.