KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Hendrick Motorsports arrived in the Heartland with speed and determination to counter the dominance Joe Gibbs Racing and Team Penske have shown through the first four NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs races.
Chase Elliott’s late victory and Kyle Larson’s steady sixth-place finish proved the organization had plenty of firepower up front. But the bigger storyline may have been William Byron, the 2025 Regular Season Champion, who finished ninth after never truly being a factor on a track that should have suited his strengths.
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Byron voiced his frustration all afternoon on a track that he and crew chief Rudy Fugle felt should’ve played into their hands.
“I just have no speed. … I’m just super-slow. I don’t know what to do,” Byron said over the No. 24’s radio at the end of Stage 2, adding later: “We clearly are missing something bad.”
“I know, just keep fighting here,” Fugle responded after he called for wholesale adjustments that brought Byron within the top 15 in the final stage.
“We struggled there at the beginning,” Byron said post-race. “We missed something, but we made a bunch of changes and came to life there in the final stage. I’m not sure … It was really confusing, honestly.”
Confusing is one way to put it. For much of the race, Byron hovered outside the top 20, failing to score stage points and visibly lacking the speed that defined his regular-season consistency. In the last true intermediate race — the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway — Byron was dominant as he swept all three stages and finished second in the crown-jewel event.
Yet, on a day when his teammates were showing signs of returning to championship form, Byron was left searching for answers.
“It sucks that we’re having to throw Hail Marys this time of year … we don’t want to do that,” Byron said. “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.”
That resilience salvaged a decent finish, but it didn’t erase the mystery. Jeff Gordon, Hendrick Motorsports’ vice chairman and Hall of Fame driver who once piloted the No. 24, was candid in his assessment.
“The 24 was the one that was kind of the eye opener today. They were pretty far off,” Gordon said. “They come out of here with a top 10 because they didn’t give up either. That one’s got (us) scratching our heads, and we’ll go back and diagnose what they went through and why they were in that position.”
Gordon’s concern is warranted. In the last eight races, Byron has only three top-10 finishes and five laps led. However, Kansas was supposed to be a momentum builder, not a setback, instead uncovering more concerns about whether Byron can return to the Championship 4 for a third consecutive year.
“This late in the season, this stage and round in the playoffs, it’s so important to get some things to go your way,” Gordon said, “to give you that extra incentive or just extra motivation to go win a championship and believe that you can do it.”
Momentum is everything in the playoffs. The back-to-back Daytona 500 champion knows that better than anyone. But Sunday’s race felt like a missed opportunity — not just for points, but for confidence to close out the Round of 12.
Now, the pressure shifts to the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval on Sunday (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App), a road course where Byron has shown flashes of brilliance. A strong run there is essential, not just to advance but to reset the tone heading into Las Vegas Motor Speedway — another 1.5-mile track that looms large to open the Round of 8.
There’s no panic in the 24 camp, but there is urgency, the kind that comes when a championship-caliber team finds itself off-kilter at the worst possible time. Kansas didn’t break Byron’s playoff hopes as he sits above the cutline with a 40-point cushion, but it does make this weekend’s Roval race important not to let one troublesome weekend turn into two.