NASCAR: 5 playoff drivers who could already be in trouble
By Asher Fair
NASCAR playoff drivers who need to panic: No. 2 – William Byron
Hendrick Motorsports’ William Byron really hasn’t looked all that great since winning at Martinsville Speedway last April to become the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season’s first two-time winner. From then until the start of the playoffs, he finished no higher than ninth place.
He had a strong playoff run, recording six top eight finishes in 10 races and never finishing lower than 16th place, but he became the first driver ever to not make it to the Championship 4 after having been the season’s first multi-race winner. The Championship 4 was introduced in 2014.
He still managed to finish in sixth place in the point standings, which is higher than many felt he would finish after struggling throughout much of the regular season.
The start of the 2023 season has been one to forget for Byron, who sits in 29th place in the standings with a top finish of 25th. Given how the 2022 season went, he may need to win to get to the playoffs for a fifth consecutive season, as the No. 24 team simply wasn’t scoring many points down the stretch a year ago.
That being said, we’ve said similar things about Byron before. In six seasons, he only has two top 20 finishes in any of a season’s first two races, and none of them have come in the last four years. Slow starts are not unusual for the driver of the No. 24 Chevrolet. But things just feel different this time around, given the overall lack of results for much of last year.