About a week ago, we documented the fact that the true "now or never" statistic regarding Denny Hamlin's NASCAR Cup Series championship hopes might be the fact that he won this year's regular season championship, and no regular season champion during the Next Gen era has won a race the following year.
Chase Elliott went winless in 2023 after winning it in 2022, Martin Truex Jr. went winless in 2024 after winning it in 2023, Tyler Reddick went winless in 2025 after winning it in 2024, and William Byron is surprisingly 0-for-34 in 2026, after winning it in 2025.
Byron came as close as he's come to winning a race this season by running second behind teammate Kyle Larson at Talladega Superspeedway this past weekend, but his defeat ultimately extended this winless streak for the previous season's regular season champion to 0-for-142 (although Elliott did miss seven races in 2023).
But one 142-race streak did indeed end at Talladega, and it has to do with Byron.
Byron was the only driver who qualified for the Championship 4 in each of the 2023, 2024, and 2025 seasons, the final three seasons under the old "win and in", knockout-style playoff format. He was therefore the only driver eligible to win the championship in all 108 races contested over those three seasons.
All 16 postseason qualifiers remained championship eligible heading into the Talladega race. But with two races to go and thus only 152 points still on the table, Byron is now 214 points behind Larson.
As a result, this coming Sunday's race at Martinsville Speedway is set to be the first race in which the driver of the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet is not championship eligible since the 2022 season finale at Phoenix Raceway.
Byron was the only driver to even qualify for the Championship 4 in both 2024 and 2025, so the only other three drivers who even entered Talladega having been eligible for 70 consecutive races were Larson, Denny Hamlin, and Chase Briscoe, the other three drivers from the 2025 Championship 4. The 2024 Championship 4 consisted of Byron, Reddick, Joey Logano, and Ryan Blaney.
Larson, Hamlin, and Briscoe all remain eligible to win the title heading into Martinsville, but Hamlin and Briscoe could both see their streaks end before the regular season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Hamlin is 73 points behind, with 76 points up for grabs in each race, while Briscoe is 79 behind.
Byron, meanwhile, is 11th in the standings as he seeks to find a way to make the 2026 season his seventh consecutive season with at least one win. He entered the 2026 season having won multiple races in four consecutive seasons.
Sunday's Xfinity 500, a race won by Byron a year ago to get him to his third straight Championship 4, is set to be shown live on NBC from Martinsville Speedway starting at 2:00 p.m. ET. Begin a free trial of FuboTV now and catch all of the action from the penultimate playoff race on the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series schedule!
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