AVONDALE, Ariz. – Winning the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series championship may have slipped out of reach for William Byron and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team, but the powerhouse group has no intention of letting the season fizzle out, remaining determined to finish the year on a high note.
“I’m showing up every week like we can win,” Byron said on Saturday in a media scrum when asked if the No. 24 team is in research and development form. “I certainly have no indication that we’re in that mode. We’re going out, trying to win. We certainly don’t want to go winless.”
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Aside from an engine failure to kickstart The Chase presented by Mobil 1 at Darlington Raceway and being an innocent bystander of a wreck involving Alex Bowman and Bubba Wallace in the closing laps of Stage 1 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, the No. 24 team has strung together top-10 finishes. It began with a fourth-place outing at World Wide Technology Raceway, with HMS putting three cars inside the top five, led by Kyle Larson snapping a 51-race winless drought. Byron backed that performance up with finishes of ninth at Bristol Motor Speedway, seventh at Kansas Speedway and sixth at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The four straight top 10s tied his longest run of the season.
Rudy Fugle, crew chief of the No. 24 group, believes that since the series regrouped from an off week in early August, Byron and Co. have been hitting its stride. He would argue it’s the best the team has performed all year.
“Really, it’s the best part of our season,” Fugle told NASCAR.com at Phoenix regarding The Chase. “Really, our season hasn’t gone great, but we’ve strived since the Indy to Iowa break and have done really well. We want to achieve higher and consistently run in the top three to five – and that’s our goal. That experience of getting used to and hunger to win races will come out, and we should be able to sneak out a win.
“We’ve been that seventh-place car since that Indy/Iowa break, and we just need to make that next jump. It’s super hard this time of the year with these guys dogfighting for a championship; they are going to bring a whole lot of car potential.”
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Byron has scored victories at three of the final four venues on the 2026 schedule. Next week will mark a full calendar year since the No. 24 team last sipped champagne in Victory Lane, stomping the field at Martinsville Speedway by leading a career-high 304 laps.
While Byron believes a victory remains within reach over the final month of the 2026 campaign, he’s not ready to call the No. 24 team’s recent stretch its strongest of the season.
“I think we’ve been solid. We haven’t had winning speed,” Byron noted. “I think there were flashes of more winning speed at Chicagoland (Speedway), Pocono (Raceway) and Vegas in the spring; we were close – top two. I don’t think we’ve had winning speed these last few weeks, but we’ve been solid, and there’s something to be said about that. Finishing solid is good.
“We haven’t scored a lot of stage points, so I wouldn’t say our speed and handling has been good enough to score a lot of stage points in bunches, which is what it takes to climb the standings nowadays.”
After the first six Chase races, Byron sits 13th in the championship standings, the same seed he entered the postseason.
Phoenix marks the final race in which Byron will represent the Axalta colors, as the company is rebranding to Axanzo in early 2027. The 16-time Cup winner is running a Jeff Gordon, vice chairman of Hendrick Motorsports, throwback scheme from the 2013 season this weekend to commemorate the partnership with the coating systems company.
“It seems like they nailed the gradient on the front, so the fans were happy about that,” Byron said of his Phoenix scheme. “Really sharp-looking race car; a lot of detail went into this paint scheme, which Axalta has always been known for a lot of detail and a lot of strong paint schemes.”
The Axanzo rebrand will introduce a new orange-based paint scheme in 2027, though keeping the flames hasn’t been ruled out.
Sunday’s Chase race at Phoenix is set for 3 p.m. ET (USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).