The advent of NASCAR's Next Gen era in 2022 came with a changing of the guard on road courses. Races once giftwrapped for Chase Elliott have shifted toward a new crop of drivers: Kyle Larson, Tyler Reddick and even surprises like Michael McDowell and Daniel Suarez.
Now, is the torch passing to William Byron?
Byron has now won two of the last three road course races, winning from the pole Sunday at Circuit of the Americas in dominant fashion. Leading 42 of 68 laps, he held off a hard-charging Christopher Bell down the stretch to become the first multi-race winner in the NASCAR Cup Series this season.
The mastery of road courses has been part of Byron's growth as a championship contender. Prior to the Next Gen era, he didn't have a single top-five finish on any right-turn track. Now, he's got two victories in hand to go with a runner-up finish at the Charlotte ROVAL last October.
How has Byron done it? No magic formula other than simple hard work.
"I don't know if I'm the most confident one when I show up," Byron explained. "But I feel like I just focus on the details that it takes. Once I kind of find that rhythm and cadence of doing the shifting and the braking, [and] you just start to fall into that place that you've been familiar with, it just kind of gets you through."
It's clear the 26-year-old, in his seventh full-time Cup season, has learned how to turn that pacing into victories after squandering four previous pole positions on road courses. This time, once his pit crew gained three seconds on the field during the final stage, Byron cycled out with a healthy lead and didn't panic when Bell started closing fast on fresher tires.
It's the type of even-keeled demeanor fans of the No. 24 car know well: former driver Jeff Gordon's nine road course wins are a NASCAR record.
"I never saw him make a mistake," said Gordon now Hendrick Motorsports' vice chairman. "Which is what it was going to take to win today in the closing laps because Bell had the faster car with the fresher tires. Any big lockup into a corner, I think it would have been a different outcome."
Instead, the clean-cut Byron raced clean and never gave Bell a chance to get within striking distance.
"Obviously, when I got close to him it was going to be tough to pass him," Bell said. "I needed a couple of mistakes. William has been really, really good on the road courses and he was flawless when it mattered today."
With this track type now inside two of the first three rounds of the playoffs, it's perfect timing for Byron to start producing. Wins at Watkins Glen, the ROVAL and then Las Vegas in the Round of 8 (a 1.5-mile oval where Byron's led 192 laps in his last three starts) would be all that it takes to catapult him into another Championship 4.
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Green: Ty Gibbs. A third at COTA tied a season best for this rising sophomore sitting second in the Cup point standings to Martin Truex Jr. No one has a better average finish than Gibbs' 7.8 with his first Cup win a matter of when, not if.
Yellow: Ross Chastain. Chastain started the final stage in control of the race and was still within range of Byron until a rough final pit stop by his Trackhouse Racing crew. A seventh-place finish was still solid but not the win the No. 1 team was hoping for to clinch an early playoff spot.
"We made a swing at a big adjustment there at the end on that final green-flag pit stop," Chastain explained, "And it went the wrong way." So did his car.
Red: Chase Elliott. What happened to what was the sport's best road course racer? Since the embarrassing Watkins Glen incident where Elliott ran out of gas, he's been 32nd, ninth and 16th in the last three events on this track type. Elliott's winless streak in Cup is now up to 40 races. During that same stretch, teammates Byron and Kyle Larson have won 14 times.
Speeding Ticket: COTA. Sunday's race was caution free aside from stage breaks, setting a brisk pace at two hours and 43 minutes. But whatever additional passing we saw from NASCAR's road course package was balanced out by the track's ultimate weakness: the track is too wide and too long for stock car racing.
Laps were being run at just under 2 minutes, 15 seconds on this 3.41-mile road course, giving Cup cars plenty of room to spread out. Track position after pit stops became the key to a race where too much of it saw the same group of drivers stuck in place. COTA's best asset is its restart zone heading intoTurn 1 but, with a lack of attrition and yellow flags, fans only got to see those wild moves three times.
Add in a middling Austin crowd and you wonder if this race returns in 2025 despite this top-tier market officials want to use to grow the sport.
Oops!
A number of smaller spins dotted the landscape for a race that produced limited contact. Road course ringer and former Formula 1 star Kamui Kobayashi was spun out twice, producing a disappointing 29th-place result. But it was a little bump-and-run by Christopher Bell on Kyle Busch that led to the biggest blow-up of the day, leading to Busch initiating a heated discussion despite finishing the race a solid ninth.
Kyle Busch is not happy with Christopher Bell. #NASCAR pic.twitter.com/oRVjHJokj3
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) March 24, 2024
"KB, he opened his entry up and then tried the crossover and I was running my line," Bell explained. "So, had I known he was going to come acrss the racetrack, I would have braked a little bit, but I never expected him to do that. So, I don't know."
Bell plans to reach out to Busch but it's doubtful the two-time champ will be in a forgiving mood: he's had two straight weeks of spins and slumped to 13th in the season standings.
