Once the rain clouds lifted and the Daytona 500 really got going this past Sunday, it gave us plenty of tight pack racing and late drama. The 56 lead changes we saw were the fifth-most ever in a Cup Series race at Daytona International Speedway, and it wasn’t clear who would emerge victorious until the last two turns of the final lap. In that sense, it was vintage Daytona: a high-speed roulette wheel of chaos, where winning was about survival as much as raw performance.
The winner, however, wasn’t a huge surprise. In fact, William Byron was pretty much exactly who we’d expect to find himself in possession of another Harley J. Earl Trophy when the smoke cleared on Sunday – particularly given how that race ended.
A year after winning his first career Daytona 500 by surviving two late wrecks that nearly took him out as well, Byron won again by narrowly slipping past the carnage that played out in front of him. It all fits a pattern of opportunism that has defined Byron’s rise to superstardom, the art and science of the late-race heist.
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Since 2023, Byron’s first season as a Championship 4 driver, he has won seven races as a “vulture” – what our podcast, Podracing, calls it when a driver wins despite leading the field in neither laps led nor Driver Rating. That’s more than any other driver in the Cup Series, ahead of teammate Kyle Larson (at 6) and Denny Hamlin, Joey Logano and Chris Buescher (at 4 apiece):
And while Larson actually had a series-high eight races taken away from him by vultures as well – leaving him in the negative on balance – Byron was only the victim of four vultured losses, which trailed Larson, Christopher Bell (7), Hamlin (6), Ryan Blaney (6) and Tyler Reddick (5). In recent seasons, Byron has repeatedly shown the right instincts to pounce on potential victories when he has the chance, while also not leaving too many checkered-flag chances of his own on the table.
As I wrote earlier in the week, the fascinating duality of Byron is that he is both the most prolific opportunist in the sport, and also one of the most talented drivers in terms of consistent pace. Since 2023, only Larson (98.5) has a higher average per-race Driver Rating than Byron (95.7), and Byron’s Adjusted Points+ Index of 187 – meaning he finished races 87 percent better than the Cup Series average – leads all drivers (Larson is second at 172).
They say it’s better to be lucky than good – but in the case of Byron, he’s both.
And he’s not alone in his approach, either. While no one has vultured more total race wins than Byron since 2023, others have arguably been even better at snatching late wins away from other drivers who arguably deserved them more. To quantify this, let’s plot a driver’s vulture rate – his share of all wins that were vultured – against another measure that typifies the Byron-like style, the share of all laps that were completed in a race before the winning driver made his final pass for the win.
In each metric, a higher number means the driver was more opportunistic, lying in wait for most of the race before striking at the perfect moment. Among all Cup Series drivers with multiple wins since 2023, here’s a plot of vulture rate versus the average percentage of the race completed at the time of the winning pass:
As we can see, Byron is the best of the six-plus time winners, with a 70% vulture rate and an average of 91.9% of the race completed when he passed for the eventual race-winning lead. (Compare that with Hamlin, who vultured 66.7% of his wins and made the winning pass 90.9% of the way into the race on average.) But a few five-win drivers were possibly even more impressive vultures than Byron himself: Reddick only had a 60% vulture rate but made his final pass 95.7% of the way into his wins, while Logano vultured 80% of his wins and made the winning pass after 95.4% of the laps were complete.
Lower the threshold below five wins, and a couple of drivers stand out as even more opportunistic still. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. had a 100% vulture rate – both of his wins came that way – and made the final pass after 94.6% of the race was complete. And Chris Buescher might be the true king of the vultures. Every single one of his four wins (100%) was a vulture, and he didn’t make his final pass to win until there was just 5.5 laps to go (97.5% of the race complete) on average. As a proportion of all his wins, nobody in recent seasons has done it with more late-race poaching than Buescher.
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Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum is Bell, who only won 40% of his races as a vulture and made the final pass just 82.5% of the way into his wins – making him a major outlier compared with other multi-time winners. (What’s the opposite of a vulture? A lion?)
There’s nothing wrong with winning either way. Doing it more frequently in dominant fashion, like Bell, Larson or Blaney often do, can be fun; everyone thrills to performances like the one Larson laid down at the 2024 Bristol night race, when he led 92.4% of available laps, posted a near-perfect 149.7 Driver Rating and made the winning pass with a whopping 167 laps remaining. But big, flashy displays of dominance are not the ultimate goal of racing – taking the checkered flag is.
More often, that comes down to strategy, discipline, tire management, track position, and taking advantage of late restarts rather than simply jumping out to an early lead and trying to lap the field.
Drivers like Byron (or Buescher, Stenhouse, Logano and Reddick) have perfected the art of the vulture, then – a racing style that rewards patience, positioning, and pouncing when it matters most. While that might also seem a lot like luck, their real skill is to consistently put themselves in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time. It was something we saw at work again on Sunday, as Byron sped past the wreckage and toward the finish line at Daytona for another scavenged win.