- William Byron stretches fuel for 144 laps to win at Iowa Speedway
- Pole-sitter Chase Briscoe finishes second, Brad Keselowski third
- Byron regains series lead, marking his second win of the season
William Byron overcame recent fuel strategy heartbreak to win Sunday’s Iowa Corn 350, stretching his final tank an astounding 144 laps to claim his second NASCAR Cup Series victory of the season and first since the Daytona 500.
“I really feel we needed to win a race,” said Byron, who led 141 laps in the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. “We deserved to win a race.”
The win, Byron’s 15th career Cup Series triumph, came at a track where the typical fuel window is only about 100 laps. He regained the series lead by 18 points over teammate Chase Elliott, who finished 14th after pitting late for fuel.
“Man, how about that for some fuel mileage?” Byron said. “We’ve had our fair share of things not go our way with fuel mileage, and just super thankful for Rudy, all these guys, all the engineers, all the engineers back at the shop. Just this whole race team, we’ve been through a lot this year. It’s been a lot of growing pains. It’s been tough on us. But it feels really good today to get a win.”
Byron led the first 67 laps and the final 74, and his car finally ran out of fuel during the celebratory burnout. “Honestly, I felt like we had a good car and just kind of raced it and just tried to be there at the end, and we were,” he said. “And luckily, the fuel was enough there at the end. I think I ran out right there. That’s why I stopped.”
Crew chief Rudy Fugle admitted they were cutting it close. “From 30 to go until eight to go, we were able to save a really big chunk and get close,” Fugle said. “And then you’re just hoping you pick everything up.”
A chaotic final stage helped Byron conserve fuel. The race featured 12 cautions for 72 laps, with seven of those yellows occurring in just a 65-lap span early in the final stage.
“You never expect it to be a fuel-mileage race,” Byron said. “But there were so many weird cautions.”
Pole-sitter Chase Briscoe finished second, 1.192 seconds behind Byron, and echoed that the traffic and cautions made a difference. “There at the end, I thought I was running William down,” Briscoe said. “I thought I was really in the catbird seat there. I just got there and kind of stalled out.”
Briscoe led 81 laps and had a strong car throughout, but his race also included two late-race incidents. On Lap 243, he made contact with Erik Jones, causing Jones to spin. Nine laps later, he bumped Tyler Reddick, who then hit Christopher Bell, sending both into a spin. “I have to apologize to (Reddick) and (Bell), that was a really bone-headed move on my part,” Briscoe said. “Got in there and got loose, and ruined their day. That’s a hundred percent on me.”
Brad Keselowski swept the first two stages and led 68 laps but had to settle for third. “Just the way the yellows fell,” Keselowski said. “We had so many yellows there in Stage 3 that it got the 24 and the 19 to where they could make it on fuel pitting way outside the window, and we just couldn’t get back by them. Got back by a lot of guys; restarted I think 24th there after we pitted and got all the way up to third, but that was as far as I could get.”
Ryan Blaney, last year’s winner at Iowa, finished fourth and said the strategy chaos changed everything. “The strategies just got weird with all of those cautions,” Blaney said. “Those guys who pitted earlier, it saved them some laps. So it just got kind of funky there, and we were on the back end of it.”
Ryan Preece finished fifth and closed the points gap to teammate Chris Buescher in the battle for a final playoff berth. Brickyard 400 winner Bubba Wallace had a dramatic rally to finish sixth despite going two laps down and suffering damage from contact with John Hunter Nemechek on Lap 242. “If you would have told me after all that we would have been P6, I would have said, ‘Yeah, right,’” Wallace said.
Alex Bowman finished seventh, maintaining a 63-point edge over Preece in the playoff picture. Carson Hocevar, Joey Logano, and Austin Dillon rounded out the top 10.
Byron’s win also gave him a sweep at Iowa across all three NASCAR national series. “When I was a kid, the iRacing schedule would always line up with the race tracks in the summer,” he said. “That’s when I would have the most time to run the races, in the summer. So I would race this track a ton in iRacing. I feel like that’s why it’s a good track for me — I just have thousands of laps kind of in my head with how the rhythm of this place goes.”
Post-race inspection confirmed Byron’s win, with the Nos. 1, 11, 12, and 48 cars taken to the NASCAR R&D Center for further evaluation.
Next up, the series heads to Watkins Glen International for the Go Bowling at The Glen. Chris Buescher is the defending race winner, and Shane van Gisbergen enters with three straight road/street course victories.
