Daytona 500: William Byron wins second straight after last-lap crash

William Byron won his second straight Daytona 500 after a last-lap wreck took out race leader Denny Hamlin on the backstretch.

Byron took over the lead when Hamlin went spinning after taking the lead from Austin Cindric on the backstretch on the final lap of a green-white-checker restart.

Byron was ninth when the white flag flew and was on the top side of the track. He estimated that he was sixth on the backstretch after moving to the middle and shuffling Hendrick Motorsports teammate Alex Bowman out of line. As Hamlin and others crashed, Byron escaped past the wreck near the wall unscathed and beat Tyler Reddick to the finish.

“Obviously, some good fortune but just trusted my instinct on the last lap there,” Byron said after getting out of his car. “I felt like they were getting squirrely on the bottom and just tried to — I was honestly going to go third lane regardless because I was probably sixth coming down the back.”

NASCAR inexplicably didn’t throw a caution on the final lap. The day before in the Xfinity Series race, race control rightly threw the caution on the last lap because of a hard crash in the tri-oval. A caution call wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the race — Byron would have been ahead when NASCAR should have thrown the caution — but the inconsistency was jarring to anyone watching the races on both days.

The Daytona 500 win is the 10th for Hendrick Motorsports as Byron got the team’s ninth in 2024. The victory breaks a tie with Petty Enterprises for the most Daytona 500 wins by a single team.

The race officially went 203 laps — three laps past its scheduled distance.

Hamlin was looking for his fourth Daytona 500 win. A victory would have tied him with Cale Yarborough for the second-most Daytona 500 wins ever behind Richard Petty’s seven.

“We didn’t have the caution on the first front straightaway spin,” Hamlin said of Riley Herbst’s slide through the grass. “And I was like, ‘Well, that’s a second lease on life to try to get [Cindric].’ So I measured up [Cindric], got a run on him and stayed with him enough that I could kind of control which side I wanted to pass him on. And then we had pulled away from the pack slightly, so I knew a run was going to come.

“[Cole Custer] had the run. I chose not to block him, like, these races you’ve got to live to make it off of Turn 4 and we just didn’t. I thought that [Custer] came down and I’m pushing [Cindric] down as low as I can, giving [Custer] all of the space and not stopping his run but I thought he — not hung a left but steered left and trying to crowd it. And I understand everyone’s trying to go for it and he’s going for it. All of us are. But in those situations, I told him in those situations, we gotta get off of 4 then we can do this. But we just never made it.”

The finish was set up by a crash with less than five laps to go when Christopher Bell got turned by Custer when Bell was alongside Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Hamlin for the lead. Bell went into the wall and Ryan Preece’s car catapulted off Bell’s car and flipped over before backing into the wall.

A crash with 15 laps to go took out a host of contenders, including Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch. Logano had a run on 2023 Daytona 500 champion Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Stenhouse moved to block Logano’s momentum. He continued to do so as Logano attempted to pass him in the middle of a three-wide situation, and Stenhouse continued to block.

That didn’t work out well.

Cindric led a race-high 59 laps while his Team Penske teammate Logano led 43. Blaney led 23 as Penske dominated the race. But none of the team’s three drivers got the win.

Logano might have had the fastest car throughout the race. He even went a lap down during the second stage after his engine went amiss and caused a pileup on a restart. After his crew changed out the engine’s ECU, they found that a piece of debris had been sucked into the engine. Once the debris was removed, Logano’s car was back at full speed and he worked his way back through the field.

The race finished before 10 p.m. ET after a long rain delay shortly after the green flag. The race was moved up an hour to 2:11 p.m. ET because of the forecast and eight laps under green were completed before rain hit the speedway. The race finally resumed after 6 p.m. ET and went the rest of the way without any other delay.

It was the fourth time in six years the Daytona 500 had been paused by rain. In 2020 and 2024 the race ended on Monday, and the 2021 race ended even later than Sunday night’s race.