By Aaron Bearden
A breakdown of Sunday’s EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas, the sixth race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season.
Main Takeaway
When William Byron won the season-opening Daytona 500, the result could be written off as a fluke. Lucky. A good break in a superspeedway race.
There was no writing off the No. 24 team’s statement win at Circuit of the Americas.
Byron completed what amounted to a road course version of a weekend Cup sweep. He was quickest in practice, took pole for the race, led the most laps and won at day’s end. The only thing Byron didn’t do was sweep the stages—a consequence of stage break cautions returning and incentivizing leaders to pit before each stage ends to cycle through to the lead for the ensuing stage.
It was an important result for Byron, because it symbolized one of the few things he’s yet to do in his impressive young NASCAR career. On a dozen prior occasions, the North Carolinian had started a Cup race on pole. But he’d never parlayed one to a win.
Now he has, becoming the first multi-win driver of the regular season in the process.
His path to the finish wasn’t easy. Despite holding a sizable lead, a look in the rearview mirror would show Joe Gibbs Racing’s Christopher Bell and Ty Gibbs shrinking it down in the closing stages. Bell closed to within a second with fresher tires on the final lap, but ultimately ran out of time.
“I felt like I made a lot of micro-errors in the last 10 laps,” Byron admitted. “I have to calm down a little bit, look back at those 10 laps and think about what could I do better in the car to stay mentally locked in and not get flustered by the mirror, seeing (Bell) closing in a braking zone?
“I just feel like there’s things I can look back on to improve.”
There was a time when Byron wasn’t a frontrunner on road courses. But his team has put in the work and become a consistent threat whenever they come around.
“We’ve been working steadily since then and kind of hit it on and off last year,” crew chief Rudy Fogle said. “Obviously Indy road course (last year) we started last and hit on some things, and Watkins Glen, winning that race. The Roval was second. (We’ve) just been steadily working on it, learning a little bit week in and week out that we race road courses.”
That improvement matches a trend of gains across the board for the No. 24 team. Byron emerged from the shadows of his title-winning teammates Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson in 2023, winning a series-high six races and making the Championship 4.
Early on in 2024, Byron has another two wins and is well on the way to contending for the title again this fall.
“Any time you can collect Playoff points early in the year, confidence, all those things, you just got to do it. … Anytime you can get momentum going and get the team fired up, get everybody fired up,” Fugle said.
“There’s going to be plenty of ups and downs this year. Anytime you can get them, you got to grab ’em.”
So far the No. 24 team’s done just that.
Good, Bad and Ugly
Good (and Bad): Bell charges forward and ruffles feathers
Had Sunday’s race been one or two laps longer, there’s a good chance Bell would have been the first driver to two wins.
The Oklahoman was on a tear over the final stint, closing a gap of over 10 seconds to less than one second as the checkered flag flew. But a difficult time passing teammate Ty Gibbs for second kept Bell from closing the ground he needed to challenge Byron in the closing stages.
Instead he settled for second and came to pit road, where he was met with a confrontation from former teammate Kyle Busch.
Kyle Busch is not happy with Christopher Bell. #NASCAR pic.twitter.com/oRVjHJokj3
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) March 24, 2024
Bell was involved in accidents with both Kyles on the day, having spun both Busch and Larson in separate incidents. He took blame for spinning Larson, but felt he’d just ran his line in the accident that enraged Busch.
“He opened his entry up and tried the crossover where I was running my line,” Bell said of Busch. “Had I known he was going to come across the race track, I would have braked a little bit. But I never expected him to do that.”
Bad: Justin Haley gets dq’ed
Rick Ware Racing has shown improvements in pace this year, but it hasn’t always gotten the results to match.
It seemed like the No. 51 team had on Sunday, but that all changed in post-race technical inspection.
Justin Haley spent much of the final run inside of the top-15. He faded in the closing laps, but still salvaged a 17th-place finish. Yet he’s classified last in the official results because of a failure to meet minimum post-race weight requirements. “The car was just too light in post-race inspection,” RWR said Sunday night.
As a result he’s dropped from 26th to 31st in the standings. That’s not an atypical place for this organization, but it has its sights set higher with Haley behind the wheel.
Ugly: Kamui Kobayashi’s misfortune
Have you ever heard someone make that one nickel joke? You know the one – a cursory Google search shows it appears to stem from “Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension.”
“If I had a nickel every time ‘x’ happened, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.”
It aptly applies to Kamui Kobayashi’s time in the NASCAR Cup Series.
On two different occasions in the past year, the ex-Formula 1 racer and sports car ace has come to America to compete in Cup road course races with 23XI Racing. He ran at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course in 2023 and returned Sunday at Circuit of the Americas.
Both times Kobayashi has shown promise, but finished poorly after being involved in multiple crashes with others – including Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in each race.
At least this time around he took the Daytona 500 winner with him.
“No, I have nothing to say,” Kobayashi told Frontstretch afterward. “I mean, if they have an explanation, I think they have an explanation because I didn’t do anything wrong. He just hit me.”
The Japanese star continued on and rallied to as high as 16th in the final stage, but was dropped again after contact from rookie Josh Berry.
Given the lack of cautions in both races – they combined for three, with only one of them being natural – Kobayashi has been relegated to finishes of 33rd and 29th. There are no current plans for additional starts, but hopefully he gets another chance to come back and get through a clean Cup race so we can see where he shakes out.
Good: Ty Gibbs. Consistently.
The sophomore just keeps churning out good runs.
Six races into his second full-time Cup career, Gibbs has notched five top-10s and three top-fives. That’s one top-five short of his career total entering the year. The consistency has Gibbs sitting at a series-best 7.8 average finish and has lifted him up to second in the standings, within five points of teammate Martin Truex Jr. for the top spot.
For a brief time, Gibbs appeared on the verge of his first Cup win at COTA. But he couldn’t quite chase down Byron and faded behind Bell in the closing laps.
“We were just a little too loose in the right-handed corner,” Gibbs said. “I just wish we were a little tighter, but we did a really good job today. My team did a great job. All props to them.”
The No. 54 team’s making a trend of those great jobs. If he can get to victory lane and score some playoff points, Gibbs might just be a title contender in his second season.
Notes
- Alex Bowman snuck in another solid top-five at COTA, his third in as many runs at the track in the Next Gen era. It also gave Bowman an important stat for consistency – his first stretch of consecutive top-fives since 2020.
- After running intermittently in Cup for over decade prior, Timmy Hill hadn’t made an official Cup start in the Next Gen era. That finally changed Sunday—running with a returning MBM Motorsports, Hill came home 36th.
- Shane Van Gisbergen was back in the Cup field and quick as usual in his third start. But the Supercars transplant’s day was undone by a speeding penalty and mechanical woes, relegating him to 20th at day’s end.
Race Results
- William Byron
- Christopher Bell
- Ty Gibbs
- Alex Bowman
- Tyler Reddick
- AJ Allmendinger
- Ross Chastain
- Chris Buescher
- Kyle Busch
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Joey Logano
- Ryan Blaney
- Chase Briscoe
- Denny Hamlin
- Bubba Wallace
- Chase Elliott
- Kyle Larson
- Austin Cindric
- Zane Smith
- Shane Van Gisbergem
- John Hunter Nemechek
- Carson Hocevar
- Ryan Preece
- Corey LaJoie
- Austin Dillon
- Todd Gilliland
- Kaz Grala
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- Kamui Kobayashi
- Harrison Burton
- Daniel Suarez
- Erik Jones
- Brad Keselowski
- Noah Gragson
- Josh Berry
- Timmy Hill
- Daniel Hemric
- Michael McDowell
- Justin Haley
Stage 1
- Christopher Bell
- Daniel Suarez
- Michael McDowell
- Austin Cindric
- Austin Dillon
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- William Byron
- Ty Gibbs
- Tyler Reddick
- Ross Chastain
Stage 2
- Denny Hamlin
- Ryan Blaney
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Todd Gilliland
- Ryan Preece
- Brad Keselowski
- John Hunter Nemechek
- William Byron
- Daniel Hemric
- Josh Berry
To see the current playoff picture, check out our weekly Playoff Points update.
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(Top photo credit: Nigel Kinrade Photography)
