William Byron was “losing his mind“ before NASCAR Regular Season triumph

Newly-crowned NASCAR Regular Season champion William Byron felt he was “losing his mind” amid the chaos in an incident-filled Richmond race on Saturday.

The Hendrick Motorsports driver wrapped up the Regular Season title with a 12th=place finish in the Cook Out 400, benefitting from a crash that eliminated his teammate and closest rival Chase Elliott.

Eliott got involved in an 11-car pile-up on lap 198 that was triggered between Kyle Busch and Chase Briscoe at Turn 3.

Byron largely avoided the initial chaos but still made contact with Elliott’s spinning car, damaging the splitter and right-side door on his No. 24 Chevrolet. Despite that, he recovered to bank enough points to wrap up the championship with one race still remaining.

However, the Richmond race was nothing short of a rollercoaster for him, encapsulating his entire season so far in the Cup Series.

“I was kind of losing my mind there for a minute,” he said about the crash. “Just felt like there was so much going on. Just such a balance of trying to manage tyres all night.

“It just got crazy on those couple restarts. That one restart was kind of the tipping point.

“We honestly had some really good runs tonight. Was happy with, like, the end of stage one, the beginning of stage two. Throughout stage two was pretty good. Beginning of stage three, we climbed, had that one set of tires that we put on, we fell way back.

“Feels great. It’s really the best 12th-place finish I’ve ever had. We came in here and really just did a solid job. We qualified solid. We always want more, but this is definitely our toughest racetrack. We just kind of came in here, had a solid plan and executed it.

“Feels really good. This team has worked extremely hard. All the guys have worked hard through the summer months. Feel like this has been the best summer we’ve ever had speed-wise. Had a lot of tough things happen throughout probably really early July.

“We had a lot of speed, but some crashes in practice and qualifying. Just some car issues and things that happened.

“But yeah, just really, really cool. Looking forward to the Playoffs.”

Byron led the championship for the majority of the Regular Season, with Penske’s Ryan Blaney and his own teammate Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott only briefly taking turns at the head of the order.

However, the standings didn’t portray the true extent of his chaotic summer stretch. While he opened the season with a win in the Daytona 500 classic, it took him until the 23rd round at Iowa to return to the Victory Lane.

There were also some rough patches along the way, including a seven-race stretch between Pocono and Dover when he finished outside the top 25 on five occasions.

Ultimately, the Iowa win helped re-ignite his campaign and he sealed the title with the Daytona 400 round still to run.

Explaining how he went from running 16 points down four weeks ago to clinching the title at Richmond Raceway, the 27-year-old said: “I think just finally some things went our way. I think honestly we’ve been doing a really good job on strategy, execution. We’ve brought good speed in August. I’d say our speed was the best in mid to late June.

“I would say in May we were super fast. Then June we were really fast. I crashed probably our best car at Pocono. Then July we just had some really bad finishes, really bad things happened to us. Ran out of fuel a couple times.

“I think we buckled down and really got back to the team we’re capable of being. Pretty impressive August probably. Probably our best August we’ve ever had just executing, thinking outside the box, bringing fast cars.”