William Byron hopes to be in the mix for Kansas Playoff race

This weekend at Kansas, William Byron is looking to build up more points and ideally, win the NASCAR Playoffs race. A win would advance Byron to the next round and take all of the pressure off of the team for the Roval.

No one wants to go to the Roval needing points. So, this week at Kansas is crucial. We saw Hendrick Motorsports struggle early. Then, to start the Round of 12 at New Hampshire, the organization appeared to steady itself.

Kansas is a more typical track, like New Hampshire. It’s pretty straightforward. So, William Byron is hoping that Hendrick is as good as they were at the Spring race. Remember, Kyle Larson stunk up the show and dominated. But Byron

“Yeah, I don’t know, hopefully, we can be in that mix we were in the Spring until we had a flat. So, hopefully we can just kind of be in the mix with whoever’s up towards the front,” Byron told 5GOATs recently. “I know we’ve worked hard on this track this week. So, I feel like we need to go out there, learn a lot, execute well, and hopefully be in a good position going into the next week.”

William Byron has been up and down at Kansas in recent years. In seven Next Gen races, Byron has three top-10s, including a P2 finish last year in the Fall race. However, he also has finishes of P16, P15, P23, and P24. The consistency hasn’t been there lately.

William Byron needs to run his race at Kansas

The worst thing that can happen for William Byron right now is a DNF. If he goes out and does what he needs to do, even if he has a mid-pack finish like P18, he should be more or less fine when it comes to points.

Entering the race weekend, Byron is +47 points to the cutline. Unless he has a major issue this week and then another tough race at the Roval, his points situation looks more or less fine. But you can’t rest on those points at this point in the season. These teams have to go out and earn everything they possibly can.

We just don’t know what we will get from Kansas. Larson completely changed the conventional thinking around this race with his win in the Spring. Outside of that, we have seen many of the greatest Next Gen races at Kansas.

So, it all depends on which race we get. Is Hendrick able to dominate again with one of their playoff drivers? Or will it be another hotly contested race that comes down to the final restart?