William Byron clinches regular season championship:…

Last year, the battle to become the regular season champion was incredibly close, with Tyler Reddick prevailing by a single point over Kyle Larson. There will be no such battle in 2025, as William Byron clinched the regular season title with one race to spare. He was helped by the fact that his closest competition [Chase Elliott] crashed out of the race, nearly taking Byron with him in a mid-race pileup.

The prize? 15 extremely valuable bonus points that the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet will carry through the first three rounds of the playoffs.

"It feels damn good," Byron told NBC Sports. "Best 12th place finish we've ever had. We did a good job, just got some damage there with the big crash and it hurt us a little bit. Honestly, there were runs where we were pretty good. We drove up to sixth and on that second-to-last run, we were third. I thought we were in a good spot, but the tire was just not good for us, and fell off really hard.

"But anyway, proud of this team. Really proud of the effort all year. We've done a really good job through a lot of adversity. It feels really good to check this one off the list. We kind of had that in the back of our minds this year, just to be consistent. And even through some adversity, we were consistently fast and just up at the front ... feels really good."

A season of ups and downs

In a press conference that followed, Byron reflected more about the first 25 races of the year. After winning the Daytona 500, Byron did not return to Victory Lane again until Iowa Speedway in August. He also had a difficult stretch in the early summer months, which saw him lose the points lead just a few weeks ago. Still, he managed to clinch the championship with a week to spare.

“Yeah, pretty awesome. 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," said Byron. "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."