William Byron won his second straight Daytona 500 after a last-lap wreck took out race leader Denny Hamlin on the backstretch.
Byron took over the lead when Hamlin went spinning after taking the lead from Austin Cindric on the backstretch on the final lap of a green-white-checker restart.
Byron was ninth when the white flag flew and was on the top side of the track. He estimated that he was sixth on the backstretch after moving to the middle and shuffling Hendrick Motorsports teammate Alex Bowman out of line. As Hamlin and others crashed, Byron escaped past the wreck near the wall unscathed and beat Tyler Reddick to the finish.
“Obviously some good fortune but just trusted my instinct on the last lap there,” Byron said after getting out of his car. “I felt like they were getting squirrely on the bottom and just tried to — I was honestly going to go third lane regardless because I was probably sixth coming down the back.”
NASCAR inexplicably didn’t throw a caution on the final lap. The day before in the Xfinity Series race, race control rightly threw the caution on the last lap because of a hard crash in the tri-oval. A caution call wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the race — Byron would have been ahead when NASCAR should have thrown the caution — but the inconsistency was jarring to anyone watching the races on both days.
The Daytona 500 win is the 10th for Hendrick Motorsports as Byron got the team’s ninth in 2024. The victory breaks a tie with Petty Enterprises for the most Daytona 500 wins by a single team.
The race officially went 203 laps and three laps past its scheduled distance.
Hamlin was looking for his fourth Daytona 500 win. A victory would have tied him with Cale Yarborough for the second-most Daytona 500 wins ever behind Richard Petty’s seven.
“We didn’t have the cauton on the first front straightaway spin,” Hamlin said of Riley Herbst’s slide through the grass. “And I was like ‘well that’s a second lease on life to try to get [Austin Cindric].’ So I measured up [Cindric], got a run on him and stayed with him enough that I could kind of control which side I wanted to pass him on. And then we had pulled away from the pack slightly so I knew a run was going to come.”
“[Custer] had the run. I chose not to block him, like, these races you’ve got to live to make it off of Turn 4 and we just didn’t. I thought that [Custer] came down and I’m pushing [Cindric] down as low as I can, giving [Custer] all of the space and not stopping his run but I thought he — not hung a left but steered left and trying to crowd it. And I understand everyone’s trying to go for it and he’s going for it. All of us are. But in those situatoons, Itold him in those situations, we gotta get off of 4 then we can do this. But we just never made it.”
The finish was set up by a crash with less than five laps to go when Christopher Bell got turned by Cole Custer when Bell was alongside his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin for the lead. Bell went into the wall and Preece’s car catapulted off Bell’s car and flipped over before backing into the wall.
A crash with 15 laps to go took out a host of contenders including Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch. Logano had a run on 2023 Daytona 500 champion Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Stenhouse moved to block Logano’s momentum. He continued to do so as Logano attempted to pass him in the middle of a three-wide situation, and Stenhouse continued to block.
That didn’t work out well.
Daytona 500 results
1. William Byron
2. Tyler Reddick
3. Jimmie Johnson
4. Chase Briscoe
5. John Hunter Nemechek
6. Alex Bowman
7. Ryan Blaney
8. Austin Cindric
9. Justin Allgaier
10. Chris Buescher
11. Michael McDowell
12. Erik Jones
13. Daniel Suarez
14. Ty Dillon
15. Ty Gibbs
17. Riley Herbst
18. Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
19. Justin Haley
20. Kyle Larson
21. Cole Custer
22. Corey LaJoie
23. Austin Dillon
24. Denny Hamlin
25. Cody Ware
26. Brad Keselowski
27. Todd Gilliland
28. Noah Gragson
29. Bubba Wallace
30. Carson However
31. Christopher Bell
32. Ryan Preece
33. Shane van Gisbergen
34. Kyle Busch
35. Joey Logano
36. Zane Smith
37. Josh Berry
38. Martin Truex Jr.
39. Helio Castroneves
40. Ross Chastain
41. AJ Allmendinger