NEWTON, Iowa — (AP) — William Byron admitted he was nervous as he headed into the final laps of the NASCAR Cup Series race Sunday at Iowa Speedway.
“But I feel like we've been on the other side of this in the last month and a half,” he said.
Byron fought off fuel worries in the closing laps. He went the last 144 laps of the 350-lap race without a stop en route to his second victory of the season — he won the Daytona 500 in February — and 15th overall. He also took the season points lead from Hendrick Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott.
Byron, who was second last season in this race, lost gambles on fuel twice this season, at Michigan and Indianapolis, but held on with the help of a caution-filled final stage to win by 1.192 seconds over pole-sitter Chase Briscoe.
“I really feel we needed to win a race,” said Byron, who led 141 laps. “We deserved to win a race.”
Byron led the first 67 during a caution-free first stage, but had to scramble with strategy as the cautions piled up.
“You never expect it to be a fuel-mileage race,” he said. “But there were so many weird cautions.”
The drivers behind Byron, who knew he was saving fuel, tried to catch him.
“It was just the way the yellows fell,” said Brad Keselowski, who finished third. “There were so many yellows there in stage 3 that it got (Byron) and (Briscoe) there where they could make it on fuel pitting way outside the window, and we couldn’t get by them. ”
“The strategies just got weird with all of those cautions,” said Ryan Blaney, last year's winner here who finished fourth. “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.”
Rudy Fugle, Byron's crew chief, said he wasn't sure until about eight laps to go whether Byron would be able to make it.
“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.”
Briscoe thought he was in good position if Byron ran out of fuel.
“There at the end, I thought I was running William down,” he said. “I thought I was really in the catbird seat there. I just got there and kind of stalled out.”
Keselowski, who came into the race needing a win to get into the playoffs, swept the first two stages for the first time since 2019. He led 68 laps trying for his first win since the May race at Darlington last season. Ryan Preece, Keselowski's teammate at RFK Racing, was fifth.
Bubba Wallace, Alex Bowman, Carson Hocevar, Joey Logano and Austin Dillon rounded out the top 10.
There were 12 caution flags. The first yellow flag for any on-track incident didn’t come out until Shane Van Gisbergen’s spin on Lap 169. From that point, the race became a cascade of caution flags as the cars began to stack up and drivers scrambled for position.
Byron has now won at Iowa Speedway in all three NASCAR series. He won in the Trucks Series in 2016 and in the Xfinity Series in 2017.
That success, he said, was built much earlier.
“When I was a kid, the iRacing schedule would always line up with the race tracks in the summer,” Byron 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.”
Briscoe was involved in two late incidents.
Briscoe made contact with Erik Jones coming out of Turn 4 on lap 243, causing Jones to spin. Nine laps later, Briscoe bumped Tyler Reddick, who then hit Christopher Bell, causing Reddick and Bell to 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.”
Wallace admitted Saturday that after winning last week at Indianapolis to secure a playoff spot, he would be able to relax over the last four races of the regular season.
This race wasn’t relaxing — he fell down by as much as two laps before finishing sixth.
“If you would have told me after all that we would have been P6, I would have said, ‘Yeah, right,'” Wallace said.
John Hunter Nemechek made contact with Wallace on Lap 242, forcing the rear-end of Wallace’s car to hit the wall near the start/finish line. Wallace headed to the pits after Jones’ spin to have a right-rear toe link repaired.
The series moves to Watkins Glen International in New York next Sunday. Chris Buescher is the defending race winner. Van Gisbergen has won three straight on road/street courses.
___ AP NASCAR: https://apnews.com/hub/nascar-racing