“We needed to win a race” - William Byron on ending NASCAR victory drought

Hendrick Motorsports driver William Byron admitted that he “needed to win a race” after ending a 22-race victory drought in the NASCAR Cup Series at Iowa.

Byron started the 2025 season by winning the Daytona 500 classic but had failed to repeat that result since then, even as his teammates Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson scored multiple wins.

However, the 27-year-old finally broke through at the Iowa Speedway on Sunday, eking out every last drop of fuel in his tank in a caution-filled race to beat Chase Briscoe to the top spot by 1.1s.

The result was also significant as it propelled him back into the lead of the championship, 18 points clear of teammate Elliott, who struggled to 14th place.

Having endured a tough run of eight races prior to Iowa during which he scored just two top 10 finishes, Byron explained that it was important for him to end his dry spell.

“I really feel like we needed to win a race. I feel like we deserved to win a race based on how we’ve run all year. It just wasn’t happening,” he said.

“I felt like we were trying to — we had to learn how to do basically everything right, and things were still not really working out in our favor.

“This was just a big relief to have one go our way, and we’ve just been running so well this year, I feel like this is going to be a big momentum boost for our team just to be able to check that one off the list and keep carrying the speed that we’ve had.”

Byron’s fuel gambles had failed in both Michigan and Indianapolis, but in an Iowa race punctuated by 12 caution periods, he executed the strategy just right to take his 15th career win.

It wasn’t until Byron was doing celebratory burnouts on the frontstretch that his No. 24 Chevrolet ran out of fuel.

“[I was] nervous for sure.

“We’ve been on the other side of that the last probably month and a half. We’ve had some situations where we ran out. I knew what to expect. I knew what to look for and all that in terms of if I ran out of fuel.

“I was just thinking about preserving as much as I could, doing a lot of different things in the car, lifting early and just not using a lot of throttle percentage.”

Byron was chased by the Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota of Briscoe towards the finish, but the latter could never close the gap enough to mount an attack.

Byron revealed that he was focusing heavily on saving fuel in the the last part of the race, which featured an uninterrupted 64-lap green flag run.

“I didn’t really understand if those guys were saving fuel as well because I just kept saving more fuel and I kept getting a gap,” he said. “I was like, ‘man, this is kind of weird.’

“I just think about some of the races we’ve been on the wrong side of this year, and usually someone is catching us at the end and we’re having to hold them off.

“To be on the other side of it this time and be pulling away and saving fuel was awesome. I was just hopefully that we could save enough.

“Rudy [Fugle, crew chief] was coaching me on how much to save, and I hadn’t really gotten any warnings in the car. He told me I had a lap on the switch.

“I felt like if I could get off of 4 coming to the white, I could win the race. That’s kind of what was in my head, and that was mostly true. I got around and did a burnout and still, I would say, at the tail end had the fuel pressure come up. I don’t know how many laps that would have been.

“It’s just awesome. The guys have worked super hard on the strategy side of things, and to see it all come together today like it did and kind of — honestly, in the reverse fortune of how it’s gone, it was pretty cool.”