NASCAR Cup Series action resumed on Sunday, with the playoff action heading to Kansas for the Hollywood Casino 400.
Chase Elliott emerged victorious at Kansas Speedway, punching his ticket to the Cup Series Round of 8, despite having found himself in P8 during the final restart. The Hendrick Motorsports driver flew up the field from the outside lane, finding himself behind Denny Hamlin and Bubba Wallace with just one lap to go.
While Hamlin and Wallace were battling it out, the former ended up sliding the latter up the racetrack and into the outside barrier, allowing Elliott to nip in for the win at Kansas by just 0.069 seconds. While Elliott was delighted with the win, the same could not be said for Byron, whose fury was clear for all to hear over the team radio.
Despite finishing ninth in the end, Byron endured a frustrating race for the most part, running in an average position of 17th. Byron, while running in 14th, could be heard saying to his team over the team radio: “We’re so f—— bad, we’re SO f—— bad.”
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“We struggled there at the beginning,” said Byron after the race via NBC Sports.
“We missed something, but we made a bunch of changes and our No. 24 Chevrolet came to life there in the final stage. I’m not sure… it was really confusing, honestly. I couldn’t carry any speed, and then the changes we made seemed to fix it, and I could carry speed there at the end.
“Even on two tires, I was competitive on the restarts. It’s just a bummer that it was the way it was early, but the bright side is that we finished well, and we found something there at the end. It sucks that we’re having to throw ‘Hail Marys’ this time of year. We don’t want to do that.
“But this team is resilient. We weren’t going to give up. The fact of the matter was that we had to fix it and work on it. We just had to try a bunch of stuff, and we got the car going in the right direction. I could carry speed and do the things we needed to do there at the end.”
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However, it wasn’t all bad news for Byron. Elliott’s win meant that Wallace didn’t, something which would have made life harder for Byron to advance in the playoffs.
Instead, Byron remains 40 points above the cutline heading into Sunday’s elimination race at Charlotte Roval next week.