Posted on by Holly Cain

HAMPTON, Ga. — Austin Cindric’s first career NASCAR Cup Series win came in the most dramatic and historic ways — a victory in the 2022 Daytona 500. Last week, the driver of the Team Penske’s No. 2 Ford was again at the front of the field in the Daytona 500. He’s led laps in six of his eight starts on the big track. And Cindric’s 59 laps led last week was the most of any driver, yet he was collected in an accident in the closing laps and rallied to an eighth place.

This weekend’s race at Atlanta Motor Speedway is considered a smaller drafting track but still along the lines of Daytona and the 2.66-mile Talladega Superspeedway. And Cindric’s performance on these kind of tracks was publicly praised this week by fellow competitor, three-time Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin — a pat-on-the-back not so common in the sport.

MORE: Atlanta lineup | Weekend schedule

“For me, it is a very high compliment,” Cindric said. “It is not often times you get to earn the respect but also hear the level of respect your competitors have for you. As superspeedway racing goes, Denny has been one of the best for the last couple of decades. For him to have a high opinion like that is pretty cool. I think that is what made the end of the race significant and special to me.”

Austin Cindric drives during qualifying at Atlanta.
Alejandro Alvarez | NASCAR Digital Media

Cindric said his work — and success on the big track — is something he takes pride in. And he answered his good work at Daytona with a front-row qualifying spot for Sunday’s race at Atlanta.

“Anything you work hard at, you certainly want to see the progress whether it is from your competitors, from within yourself or from your own team,” Cindric said. “I can remember the first two Truck races I did on superspeedways. I hated it! I hated it because I didn’t understand it. When we did the first race here, after they repaved it, I hated it. But that is because I didn’t understand it.

“Now I feel like I look forward to it. That is a huge evolution. That is not just allowing it to happen and understanding that you have to get better to enjoy it. I only have fun if I am out there trying to be successful. If there is an impact on others out there around me, either positive or negative, so be it, but it is a challenging thing to make progress at a level this high.”

Posted on by John Crane

HAMPTON, Ga. — Chase Briscoe has already experienced highs and lows as a Joe Gibbs Racing driver.

Three days after starting on the pole and finishing fourth in the 67th annual Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway last weekend, Briscoe and his new team were levied an L2-level penalty after further inspection by NASCAR officials found modifications to the No. 19 Toyota’s spoiler. Briscoe was subsequently docked 100 driver points and 10 playoff points, while JGR was fined $100,000 and stripped of 100 owner points and 10 playoff points.

Crew chief James Small was also suspended for four races. The team indicated it would appeal the ruling, and Small was with the No. 19 team for this weekend’s Cup Series race in Atlanta, with his suspension deferred pending the appeal hearing.

RELATED: Atlanta weekend schedule | At-track photos

“I mean, obviously, it’s not ideal, timing-wise, right? You know, especially at the beginning of the season, just as we’re trying to kind of understand each other and get to know each other more,” Briscoe said when speaking about the penalty and the possibility of losing Small for four races. “But, yeah, I mean, it would sting, for sure. But you know, also, there is a ton of depth there at JGR, so I don’t know who they would go with, but, you know, like having (Chris) Gabehart [JGR competition director] and all the people they have in place, you know, at least it’ll be a little bit easier, I guess, than, you know, some other companies would have, would have something like that happen.”

The circumstance isn’t a first for the Indiana native. As driver of the No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford, Briscoe was dealt an L3-level penalty in May 2023 after the discovery of a counterfeit part in the No. 14 machine, resulting in the docking of 120 points in both the driver and owner standings, in addition to the loss of 25 playoff points.

Despite similar circumstances, Briscoe believes that the timing difference between when the penalties occurred can be significant in the long term.

“It’s a little bit different, I would say, just with it being right at the beginning of the year,” Briscoe said. “I mean, literally the first race, it’s just … if we don’t win the appeal, you’ve kind of used up your mulligans. You kind of had like, three or four times where you can have a DNF throughout the season and still make the playoffs. But if we don’t win the appeal, I already used those up. I don’t have any weekends that I can have, you know, bad. So, yeah, we’ll definitely change things, but you’re still gonna have to win if you want to be a championship contender. You have to win a race anyways to get into playoffs, and, yeah, hopefully, that’s what we can do.”

Briscoe, who joins his new team after SHR’s closure following the 2024 season’s conclusion, looks to continue to grow his stature within the JGR ranks. And while he and the No. 19 currently sit 45th (!) in the driver standings and minus-67 in the points table, Briscoe believes the adversity does not change where the team currently stands.

“Honestly, I feel like right now, whether we’re facing it or not, like, we’re so integrated right now,” Briscoe said. “Just trying to get to know each other and learn each other, you know, with it being so new that I don’t really feel like it changes anything. You know, I was maybe three or four years in to this team, it would maybe make a little bit of a difference. But right now, like, I’m at the shop a lot, super into trying to build that chemistry and all those things. So adversity, I wouldn’t say, really brings us closer together. So I don’t feel like it changes a whole lot there.”

Despite the sting from the penalty news, Briscoe believes there is plenty of opportunity to make up ground, beginning at Atlanta Motor Speedway, where the No. 19 will start 25th in Sunday’s Ambetter Health 400 (3 p.m. ET, FOX, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). In eight career Cup starts at the Georgia 1.5-miler, Briscoe has yet to crack the top 10 and has crashed in each of the last two Cup races there, with finishes of 31st and 38th, respectively.

MORE: Sunday’s starting lineup | Projected results for Atlanta spring race

Regardless of past track results and team penalties, Briscoe believes he can not only contend for race wins but also contest for Cup Series titles.

As a JGR driver, Briscoe believes it more than ever.

“I’m excited for what this opportunity is. You know, I was literally telling Marissa (Briscoe, wife) just last week,” Briscoe said. “Like, in the past, I’ve told myself I can win a Cup championship, but down deep, I’m like, man, the odds are it’s probably not gonna happen, being where I was. Now, I feel like I can legitimately go win a championship. So just from an equipment standpoint, like the expectations and just even the performance, just the small window I’ve had, just Bowman Gray and Daytona, like, it’s been very eye-opening, just what I feel like I’ve been racing against.

“So, I’m super-optimistic for this year, and I feel like, you know, I feel really good about where we’re at as a race team, just being so new, you know, James and I’s chemistry, and even, like, Drew (Herring), my spotter, like I figured we would go to Daytona and there’d be learning curves and things just that are different, and it was honestly, super simple. I felt like I had been there for three or four years from a communication standpoint, so I feel really good about where we’re at, and we’re only gonna get better as time goes.”

Posted on by Holly Cain

HAMPTON, Ga. – Ryan Blaney won his first pole position of the season — 11th of his career — Saturday morning at Atlanta Motor Speedway, with his two Team Penske teammates, Austin Cindric and Joey Logano also earning front-of-the-field starts for Sunday’s Ambetter Health 400 (3 p.m. ET on FOX, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

The Penske team — whose three cars combined to lead the most laps in the season-opening Daytona 500 a week ago — will take the field to green on the 1.5-mile Atlanta high banks.

Blaney’s lap of 179.371 mph in the No. 12 Team Penske Ford was a slight .002-second faster than Cindric’s and only .040-second quicker than Wood Brothers Racing driver Josh Berry, in a Penske-affiliated Ford Mustang himself.

MORE: See full lineup for Atlanta | Full weekend schedule

The 2023 Cup Series champion Blaney was part of last season’s three-wide thriller of a finish in this race, which he, Kyle Busch and race winner Daniel Suárez relived in the recent ‘So Damn Close’ short film.

“It’s a big testament to our whole group, Team Penske and Wood Brothers, to be the top four,” the 31-year-old Blaney said.

“It just shows you how similar all our cars are being right there together, so hope it translates to the race tomorrow in handling, and we’ll find out,” he added. “Pretty cool day.”

Fords clearly dominated the qualifying session, earning 10 of the first 11 positions on the grid. Logano was fourth fastest, followed by Front Row Motorsport’s Todd Gilliland – one of three FRM cars to advance to the 10-car final qualifying round. His teammates Zane Smith and Noah Gragson were seventh and 10th fastest.

The lone Chevrolet among the top positions was Kyle Busch, whose No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Camaro will roll off sixth. He was runner-up to Trackhouse Racing’s Daniel Suarez in the closest three-wide finish in series history last year at Atlanta. Suarez will roll off 29th in the No. 99 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet. Blaney was the third driver in that historic trio.

There were only two Toyotas to crack the top 20 in Saturday’s time trials – 23XI Racing teammates Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick, who will start 14th and 18th, respectively. The perennial championship-favorite Joe Gibbs Racing team did not fare too well, with Chase Briscoe 25th, Christopher Bell 32nd, Ty Gibbs 36th and Denny Hamlin 37th on the 39-car grid.

Despite his promising showing Saturday, Blaney conceded this style of small superspeedway-type racing at Atlanta creates a lot of drama similar to the bigger drafting tracks like Daytona and Talladega. Meaning anything is possible no matter the grid outlook.

“That’s the start and hopefully it stays that way, but things are going to change during the race,” Blaney acknowledged, “But it’s kind of nice that at least the start of the race through the first stage you can control. It’s not going to be that way the whole race. You’re going to get shuffled at some point and strategy is going to come into play so it’s how do you react to that. But it’s nice to all start together.”

Blaney said there is always a lot of discussion among his team about how to keep the cars together, up front and out of danger.

“Fast cars and teamwork like that is the reason you see all of us leading a bunch of laps and contending for these wins, so it’s nice to be around each other at first but I’d like it to be like that at the end,” he said smiling.

Posted on by John Crane

HAMPTON, Ga. — Justin Allgaier’s 2025 NASCAR campaign has already been a memorable one. Fresh off double duty at Daytona International Speedway in the Cup and Xfinity Series last weekend — with Allgaier’s No. 40 Cup entry also doubling as JR Motorsports’ first in NASCAR’s premier circuit — the 38-year-old Illinois native heads into the Atlanta Motor Speedway race weekend with plenty to reminisce.

The new season additionally serves as a reminder that, even as the reigning Xfinity Series champion, everything is a clean slate. For Allgaier, the reminder is a necessary one.

RELATED: Atlanta schedule | At-track photos 

“I had a great piece of advice from my wife (Ashley Allgaier) … It is the truth, and I love it,” Allgaier said. “She said, ‘Enjoy the championship while you can because when you get to Daytona, you’re a zero again.’ She said, I don’t mean you personally are a zero, but she said you have zero points when you get to Daytona. Like, they don’t give you an extra five bonus points at Daytona because you won a championship last year. You start over just like everybody else.

“And if you are expecting a handout in that regard, like, you’re not going to get it. They’re going to race you just as hard because it doesn’t matter that you won a championship. The finishes aren’t going to be easier. You’re not just going to have a magic wand that you can wave over everything to make it easy anymore. You’re going to have to go want it again.”

Allgaier wheeled the No. 40 JRM entry to a ninth-place finish at Daytona in what was the organization’s Cup debut. Although Allgaier finished 18th in the Xfinity Series race a day prior, the No. 7’s speed was apparent from the jump, with Allgaier starting on the pole and leading 11 laps.

While Allgaier did not find Victory Lane during his Daytona double, all remains calm for the No. 7 team. After all, the season has just begun. More importantly, Allgaier maintains the same mindset that helped the No. 7 team hoist the 2024 Xfinity Series title trophy.

The mindset, according to Allgaier, came from one of the team’s engineers. After the No. 7 had a rough stretch of races during the opening portion of the 2024 Xfinity Series Playoffs, the engineer laid out a “road map” on a piece of paper, which detailed a series of finishes and points totals. If each box was checked on the piece of paper, the No. 7 team would make the Championship 4.

Although Allgaier initially couldn’t envision the thought of a Championship 4 berth after initially “being behind the 8-ball,” the No. 7 eventually wheeled its way to the Championship 4, one point more than what the piece of paper detailed. The rest was history.

MORE: Xfinity Series lineup for Atlanta spring race | Xfinity Series entry list for Atlanta spring race

“I was like, man, that’s, that’s pretty special, that somebody could sit down, you know, seven … probably five races before the end of the season, and say, if you do all of these things and you score this many points, you’ll make the final four,” Allgaier said. “And ultimately, we did, and that was really cool. And he was smiling the whole time that he did it when everybody else was doing gloom. And he’s still smiling today because he’s a champion out of it. So, it worked out pretty well.”

Allgaier will look to keep that mindset — and perhaps create another lasting memory — at Atlanta in the Bennett Transportation & Logistics 250 on Saturday (5 p.m. ET, The CW, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

Posted on by Press Release

CONCORD, N.C. (Feb. 21, 2025) — NASCAR’s Motor Racing Network (MRN) and Speedway Motorsports’ Performance Racing Network (PRN) today announced the creation of the NASCAR Racing Network (NRN). Last Friday, the network kicked off its live coverage of the Craftsman Truck Series from Daytona International Speedway with the season-opening Fresh From Florida 250 won by Corey Heim.

“Working side by side, MRN and PRN have built one of the largest radio networks in sports, delivering the excitement of NASCAR racing to hundreds of thousands of race fans coast to coast,” said Chris Schwartz, Motor Racing Network president. “The NASCAR Racing Network builds on each other’s strengths and creates a new path for us to elevate the NASCAR Radio landscape for fans and stakeholders of the sport.”

RELATED: Truck Series schedule 

The tough trucks of NASCAR turn their attention to Atlanta Motor Speedway for this Saturday’s Fr8 208 airing at 1:30 p.m. ET on the new NASCAR Racing Network.

“Longtime fans of the Craftsman Truck Series may notice new voices but will hear the same great coverage they have come to expect over the years,” said Gerry Horn, Performance Racing Network senior vice president and general manager. “We are thrilled to formalize a partnership that will strengthen both networks allowing us to continue providing award-winning NASCAR coverage to fans nationwide.”

You can follow along all season as the NASCAR Racing Network races to crown a 2025 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Champion

Posted on by Staff Report

A three-member appeals panel upheld penalties against the Henderson Motorsports No. 75 team in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, ruling in a Thursday hearing that the team’s disqualification from the season-opening race at Daytona International Speedway would stand.

RELATED: Craftsman Truck Series schedule | Truck Series preview: Atlanta

Parker Kligerman had driven Henderson’s No. 75 Chevrolet to an apparent victory in the Fresh from Florida 250 on Feb. 14, but the truck did not pass post-race inspection when competition officials found that it failed to meet ride-height requirements, measuring too low in the rear (Section 14.17.3.2.2.2.A in the NASCAR Rule Book). That decision handed the win to Tricon Garage driver Corey Heim.

Henderson Motorsports indicated shortly after the disqualification that it planned to appeal, stating on social media: “We feel that we have a very valid case to present to NASCAR.”

In denying Henderson Motorsports’ appeal, the National Motorsports Appeals Panel explained: “The panel confirms it is more likely than not a rules violation did occur and the disqualification penalties in Rule 10.5.2.4 necessitate a race disqualification.”

Since the hearing was an expedited appeal of a disqualification, the ruling of the panel is final with no further appeals available.

Shortly after the ruling was announced, the team addressed and accepted the results of its appeal on social media.

“Unfortunately we have lost our appeal regarding our disqualification from last week’s race in Daytona,” Henderson Motorsports said via a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “While we feel that we had a very strong case, we respect the panel’s decision. We’d again like to thank all the fans for their support. We’ve shown that we can compete, and we’ll be back. See you all in Bristol!”

The three-member panel was comprised of Bill Mullis, Tommy Wheeler and Kevin Whitaker.

Posted on by Holly Cain

The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series follows up its dramatic Daytona season-opener in the first half of Saturday’s NASCAR double-header at Atlanta Motor Speedway with the Fr8 Racing 208 (1:30 p.m. ET on FS1, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).

Championship favorite Corey Heim was declared the winner of the Daytona opener after Parker Kligerman’s team was disqualified after post-race inspection. The turn of events earned Heim his first-ever visit to Daytona’s Victory Lane and gives him a slim three-point advantage over 2024 series champion and Daytona third-place finisher Ty Majeski entering the Atlanta race.

RELATED: Atlanta schedule | Truck standings

The Daytona top 10 may be a good indicator of what to expect this season in terms of competitive highlights with perennial title-favorite Grant Enfinger (fourth) and a handful of talented full-timers joining the grid from Chandler Smith (sixth), who led a race best 34 laps, to former NASCAR Xfinity Series champion Daniel Hemric (seventh) and highly touted rookie William Sawalich (ninth).

Frankie Muniz, the television and movie star, eager to cement a new career in full-time NASCAR competition, finished a career best 10th place at Daytona.  Two-time series champion Ben Rhodes led 22 laps but finished 20th while young talents such as Rajah Caruth and Tyler Ankrum were collected in crashes.

Among the full-time drivers, there are three former Atlanta race winners entered this weekend, including Heim, who hoisted the trophy in 2022, Enfinger, who won in 2020, and Matt Crafton, the 2015 winner.

Kyle Busch is the seven-time and defending race winner and will be competing Saturday in the No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet.

Qualifying is set for 3 p.m. ET on Friday (FS1). The polesitter has won five times — the most of any position on the grid; the last time was in 2017 with driver Christopher Bell.

Posted on by Zack Albert

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — 23XI Racing announced a renewal and strengthening of its partnership with Xfinity on Wednesday, a move that provides both sponsorship and a technological edge to one of NASCAR’s newer teams. In doing so, the organization opened the doors of its Airspeed headquarters to provide a glimpse into how that partnership powers its race-day nerve center and to offer a first look at a new paint scheme with that support on full display.

23XI pulled back the curtain — at least partially — on its in-race war room, which has been newly branded as the Xfinity Speed Center. The team also unveiled the No. 45 Xfinity Mobile Toyota for Sunday’s Ambetter Health 400 (3 p.m. ET, FOX, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at Atlanta Motor Speedway, with Jess Muir — Xfinity’s senior director of brand partnerships and amplification — helping driver Tyler Reddick reveal the new look.

RELATED: Atlanta weekend schedule | Power Rankings, post-Daytona

The renewed commitment from one of NASCAR’s premier partners has produced a full-circle moment for 23XI’s roster. All three of its drivers — Bubba Wallace, Tyler Reddick and Riley Herbst — rose to the NASCAR Cup Series through the Xfinity Series, creating bonds with Xfinity’s representatives along their developmental path. Wallace, who spent two full seasons (2015-16) in the Xfinity Series, called it a “welcome-home party, just because of the people that run Xfinity.” The homecoming feel also resonated for Reddick, who won two Xfinity Series championships (2018-19) before reaching Cup.

“Typically, when you bring someone in that you’re going to work with, you meet new people, new faces, and with this, there’s a lot of familiarity,” Reddick said. “We’ve gotten to spend a lot of time over the years through running in the Xfinity Series. So for me, just really cool. I wouldn’t be here today, sitting here talking about this partnership, if I didn’t have those huge moments in the Xfinity Series, and so it’s just really cool that it’s come back around.”

23XI — the organization founded by Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin — is beginning just its second season operating out of Airspeed, the 114,000-square-foot facility that houses its newly expanded three-car Cup Series outfit. The attention to detail shows throughout the building’s two stories, and the Xfinity Speed Center stays true to that meticulous theme.

Dave Rogers, 23XI’s senior director of competition, says that roughly 12 to 15 employees work from the Speed Center on race day, with about half that workforce manning practice and qualifying sessions. Each of 23XI’s race teams has a vehicle dynamics engineer and one analytics engineer. The vehicle dynamics group works from the war room as one unit, while analytics engineers set up shop at the track.

“They’re the guys looking at fuel mileage and race strategy and stuff like that,” Rogers says, “and then we keep our vehicle dynamicists here and through all the equipment here, those vehicle dynamicists can report directly to the crew chief.” Keeping that group of personnel closer to their North Carolina homes, free from travel time and the long hours at the track, helps to keep them fresh — “human performance,” as Rogers terms it.

MORE: Inside Airspeed, 23XI’s home

War-room staff for all three teams share information from the four rows of theater-style seating, communicating freely through an intercom system on their laptops and soaking in a wide array of data and camera feeds on a giant display. A full-field leaderboard separates 23XI’s own drivers and Toyota stablemates with different color-coded highlights on one side, and on the other, eight sections show pit-stall cameras, in-car feeds and weather radar.

It’s a potential overflow of information, but not of noise. The much lower-key bustle of the Speed Center environment — quiet, connected and collaborative — draws a sharp contrast to the typical at-track commotion.

“What’s crazy for us is, as you hear now, it’s very calm in here,” says Mike Wheeler, 23XI Racing’s senior director of planning and operations and a former crew chief. “I sat on the (pit) box for many years, so has Dave. It’s easy to get punched in the face at the race track and not know what’s going. In here, it’s easy to keep track of two or three teams, so it’s a never-ending success for us to have the group here.”

Wheeler recounted a moment from last season’s Cup Series playoffs, when broadside contact between Reddick and Hamlin at the Charlotte Motor Speedway road course caused the No. 45 Toyota to lift and jolt. He said that a vehicle dynamicist and a junior engineer analyzed images of the damage, then told crew chief Billy Scott about their calculations, helping inform his decisions about which adjustments to make.

“What’s interesting now that we’re here at the Xfinity Speed Center, I spend most of my time on the weekends here and don’t feel disconnected from the race track,” says Wheeler, who has five Cup Series wins during his time as a Cup Series crew chief. “It’s actually amazing how much you can be in here and know what’s going on, and not even just knowing what’s going on with one team. You can actually listen to … all three teams, because it is quiet, it is condensed and it is structured.”

23XI’s competition czars held back on what information was displayed to a gathering of reporters Wednesday, suggesting that the team has more analytics and insights in reserve to stay competitive with other Cup Series operations. That effort now has extra backing and branding from Xfinity, which has long prided itself on its reliability and speedy service.

“Technology changes so fast,” Rogers says. “I think if you look at the display, I imagine we’re hard-pressed to be beat on that, the amount of data we can get up there and then the secret sauce that we’re not showing you. … I think that’s what separates the top teams is the data that you can get and how you can present it in a digestible form and get it to the crew chief so they can actually do something with it.”

23XI Racing driver Tyler Reddick and Xfinity executive Jess Muir stand alongside the No. 45 Toyota with Xfinity Mobile branding that will race at Atlanta Motor Speedway
Zack Albert | NASCAR Digital Media
Posted on by Neil Paine

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.

RELATED: Results from Daytona 500 | Atlanta schedule

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):

neil paine chart

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:

neil paine chart

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.

Listen to Neil Paine on his podcast:

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.