Blaney & Byron Leave Darlington Disappointed

DARLINGTON, S.C. — While Denny Hamlin was celebrating his second consecutive NASCAR Cup Series victory, Ryan Blaney and William Byron will digesting disappointing losses Sunday night at Darlington Raceway.

Hamlin used a late restart to score the 56^th victory of his career after a yellow flag with five laps remaining spoiled what looked to be an easy victory for Blaney. Meanwhile, Byron dominated the Goodyear 400, leading 243 of 297 laps, and finished second to Hamlin in the green-white-checkered dash to the finish.

Blaney had passed Tyler Reddick for the lead with five laps remaining when Kyle Larson spun for the second time in the race and brought the yellow flag.

The field pitted with Reddick and Hamlin beating Blaney out of the pits. Hamlin drove away over the final two laps to win, while Byron charged to second and Blaney slid to fifth at the checkered flag.

“I’m proud of the effort that we had,” Blaney said. “I’m obviously disappointed in the result. I thought we could have won the race and had a good shot at winning the race. We did the last run perfectly. I thought our pit call was fantastic and our car was fast enough to stay. It had a lot of speed in it late, but a late yellow and then lost the lead off pit road.

“We didn’t even get to start on the front row and you’re not gonna go from fourth to first in a green-white-checkered here, so it just wasn’t meant to be, but proud of the effort.”

Blaney described his feelings when he took the lead and the yellow flag waved.

“If the caution didn’t come out, I thought we had it won easily,” Blaney said. “We were so much faster on newer tires. It was a great strategy call running long. Those guys short pitted and they were struggling real bad, and I thought if we could have just got off of two with the lead and the caution didn’t come out, I thought I was gonna kind of ride off into the sunset. That’s just not how it worked, unfortunately. We lost the lead on pit road, lost a front row starting spot and never had a shot.”

Byron was equally disappointed.

“I felt like we were in position to have a perfect race there,” the series point leader said. “That would have been pretty damn impressive. It sucks, but nobody is at fault. Those guys could be aggressive on the other side of us and it was turning into a big strategy play. We just couldn’t keep control.”