Charlotte’s William Byron delivered a special anniversary gift to Hendrick Motorsports
Before Sunday’s Cook Out 400, one of William Byron’s representatives told him that the script for Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race had already been written.
Race tracks always draw thousands of fans decked out in the colors that represent their favorite drivers’ sponsors and paint schemes. While it was far from seeing the Panthers’ light blue and black jerseys around Bank of America Stadium, there was a prominent color inside Martinsville Speedway on Sunday.
All four Hendrick Motorsports drivers — Byron, Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman — recorded strong Top 10 performances in their ruby red cars as their team celebrates its 40th anniversary.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know how you had that planned out with us starting 18th,’“ Byron said with a laugh. “And you can’t pass at this race track.”
Byron, the Charlotte native and Daytona 500 winner who continues adding accolades to his name, was the fastest. Still 26 years old, Byron remembers walking into Hendrick Motorsports’ Concord shop and just being overwhelmed by how nice everything was.
It felt like real-life racers’ whose mindset was simply to compete and drive fast, as opposed to those iRacing video game players — like he was his whole life. But as Hendrick officials, who eventually included vice chairman Jeff Gordon, sat down with a 20-year-old Byron and made him feel at home, he understood how special the legendary racing team was.
“You just cannot have planned it any better, scripted it any better,” Gordon said. “Listen, I didn’t even know if I was gonna like being in this role, working as much as I am. I mean, these guys do the hard work, definitely, but from being a driver to basically a desk job and being in an office every day. That’s not where I envisioned my life going.
“But days like today. Weeks like this. And years like what we’re already off to. It’s beyond what I could ever imagine and dream of.”
A red-clad group of roughly 1,500 Hendrick Motorsports employees and their family members boarded seven buses to Martinsville Sunday morning and were stationed outside Turn 2 throughout the race.
Rick Hendrick, who missed the race as he’d recently underwent knee surgery and called into the FS1 broadcast post-race, had that idea. It wasn’t a free ticket — Hendrick officials encouraged each other to bring their families and buy more tickets at a discounted rate. They only anticipated a few hundred, and the turnout far exceeded their expectations.
“I know Rick wants his place to go on at least for the next 40 years,” Larson told reporters. “So days like today, those milestones are gonna mean something. They meant a lot then, but they’re gonna mean even more down the road.”
Said Byron’s crew chief, Rudy Fugle: “If I was a competitor and looked up to Turn 2 and saw all those people there, I’d be intimidated by that. We got pumped up by that today.”
Gordon stayed near Larson’s pit box in between Turns 1 and 2 and Larson, who started on the pole, led the entirety of Stage 1.
Gordon could sense the confidence with which Byron has been driving. Even when he wasn’t even close to leading the race early on, he passed cars when he was able — and his team perfectly timed their pit stops.
With roughly 60 laps left and Hendrick drivers controlling the race, reality popped into Gordon’s mind. But 10 laps later, the leaders started to find themselves in traffic with lap cars, and Gordon grew increasingly nervous. The first caution in nearly 200 laps came moments from the white flag.
As Byron led the field through overtime and approached the checkered flag, Gordon jumped off the side of the pit box in celebration. Not far behind Larson were Elliott and Larson — as easy as one, two, three.
“There’s just too much at stake for winning these races,” Elliott told reporters. “I felt pretty good that one of us was gonna win the race — unless we crashed each other, and I wasn’t too worried about that. Gave him a shot there to try to win the race, didn’t work out, but one of us won it.
“The ‘ifs,’ ‘ands,’ ‘buts’ — don’t really matter at this point. William was able to get it done. We got a nice 1-2-3 for Hendrick.”
This story was originally published April 8, 2024 at 2:30 AM with the headline "Charlotte’s William Byron delivered a special anniversary gift to Hendrick Motorsports."
