Here's the thing about the tail end of a NASCAR season: when the title slips away, most teams quietly pack it in and start testing for next year. Not William Byron and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports outfit. Sitting 13th in the championship standings after the first six Chase races, they are refusing to let the year fizzle out into meaningless laps.
“I’m showing up every week like we can win,” Byron stated. That is a proper racer's mindset for a machine that simply refuses to go down without a fight. They certainly want to avoid going winless.
It is not like the speed vanished entirely. Aside from an engine failure to kickstart The Chase presented by Mobil 1 at Darlington Raceway and getting caught up in a late wreck involving Alex Bowman and Bubba Wallace in the closing laps of Stage 1 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, this team has quietly strung together four straight top-10 finishes. That run started with a fourth-place outing at World Wide Technology Raceway during a weekend where Hendrick Motorsports put three cars inside the top five, highlighted by Kyle Larson snapping a 51-race winless drought. Byron then backed that up with a ninth at Bristol Motor Speedway, a seventh at Kansas Speedway, and a sixth at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, tying his longest run of top 10s all season.
Rudy Fugle, crew chief of the No. 24 group, sees this stretch as the absolute peak of their year. Since the series returned from an off week in early August, Fugle points out they have been hitting their stride. They have been running as that seventh-place car since the Indy to Iowa break, but the ultimate goal remains breaking into the top three to five and sneaking out a victory. As Fugle noted, dogfighting against drivers contending for a championship this late in the year means everyone brings massive car potential, making that next jump exceptionally tough.
Byron himself is hesitant to call this recent consistency their strongest form, admitting they lack the raw winning speed they flashed back in the spring at Chicagoland Speedway, Pocono Raceway, and Vegas, where they finished in the top two. They also have not been hauling in stage points in bunches, which is practically mandatory for climbing the modern standings. Still, consistency has its own virtue.
Time is ticking to find Victory Lane again. Next week marks a full calendar year since the No. 24 team last tasted champagne after absolutely stomping the field at Martinsville Speedway, where Byron led a career-high 304 laps. Conveniently, he has scored victories at three of the final four venues on the 2026 schedule.
This weekend at Phoenix also marks the final appearance for the iconic Axalta colors before the company rebrands to Axanzo in early 2027. To commemorate the partnership, the 16-time Cup winner is rocking a gorgeous Jeff Gordon throwback scheme from the 2013 season—a machine featuring a heavily detailed gradient on the front that fans have thoroughly embraced. While the Axanzo rebrand brings an orange-based paint scheme next year, the legendary flames might still make an appearance.
