William Byron Wins 2025 NASCAR Cup Series Regular Season Championship

WILLIAM BYRON CELEBRATES HIS WIN AT CHARLOTTE – Photo by John Knittel for Motorsport America

With a 12th-place finish, William Byron clinched the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series Regular Season Championship on Saturday at Richmond Raceway. It marks the first Regular Season Championship for the 27-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, who banks an additional 15 playoff points to his 17 earned through the first 25 races this season. He needed to finish Saturday’s race at least 62 points ahead of second in the standings to secure the crown.

“It’s really the best 12th-place finish I’ve ever had,” Byron said in his post-race press conference. “We came in here and really just did a solid job. We qualified solid. We always want more, but this is definitely our toughest racetrack. We just kind of came in here, had a solid plan and executed it.

“This team has worked extremely hard. All the guys have worked hard through the summer months. Feel like this has been the best summer we’ve ever had speed-wise. Had a lot of tough things happen throughout probably really early July. We had a lot of speed, but some crashes in practice and qualifying. Just some car issues and things that happened. Just really, really cool.”

Byron benefited from Stage 2 trouble with Hendrick Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott. At Lap 198, Elliott received race-ending damage after getting caught up in an 11-car melee triggered from contact between Kyle Busch and Chase Briscoe entering Turn 3. Entering Richmond, Elliott had completed all but one lap this season and finished inside the top 20 in every race until last week at Watkins Glen International.

Byron received minor damage in the crash, nearly making it through the incident unscathed before contacting the spinning Elliott, hurting the splitter and door. He fought uphill the rest of the night, making it back into the mix before burning off his tires in the final run of the night.

“I was kind of losing my mind there for a minute,” Byron explained about the crash.” It never helps getting damage like that. I felt like, I mean, it was another example of making something out of nothing. We put on that set of tires, and we kind of burned that set of tires, got some track position from that. We got back to the top 10. Then that kind of set us up for a really good Stage 3. All of a sudden, we were in the top five. We just had that bad run where we just couldn’t hang on to all four tires really.”

The No. 24 driver opened the season with a bang, winning his second consecutive Daytona 500 in February. He took over the points lead in March at Circuit of The Americas after finishing second, surrendering the top spot just once between then and mid-July.

Byron had some summer woes, running out of fuel in the closing laps at Michigan International Speedway while in pursuit of victory, kick-starting a stretch of five finishes of 27th or worse over the next seven races.

“I think just finally some things went our way,” Byron said regarding the mid-summer turnaround. “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. 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.”

Byron’s Regular Season Championship checks the first box as the iRacing turned Hendrick phenom looks toward his third consecutive Championship 4 appearance and first Bill France Cup.