William Byron reveals reality of fuel situation after saving win at Iowa

What type of race is run can have as big an impact on the winner as anything else in NASCAR. So you might have been surprised to hear that William Byron won a fuel saving race at Iowa on Sunday.

Byron had previously ran out of fuel twice in races earlier this season. But he said his crew has been honing in on getting it right.

“It’s definitely a razor’s edge that we all are kind of on,” Byron said on the Dale Jr. Download. “I think a lot of it has to do with tire fall-off. This week there wasn’t a lot of fall-off. We knew that in practice. We were going faster as we ran, basically, especially Group 1. Took about 20 laps to get their quickest lap and for the track to kind of clean up.

“We knew there was probably maybe a half second of fall-off in the tire, so that was really a lot of the strategy. And then I mean, yeah, as far as the fuel goes, yeah, it’s a razor-thin margin. It’s very track position dependent. So if you’re out in the lead you’re burning a lot more fuel. We’re just up against really tight windows.”

William Byron almost certainly wouldn’t have made it had it not been for a number of late cautions in Stage 3 of the Iowa Corn 350. They just kept coming, tying a season record in the process.

That put the No. 24 car out front and eventually he started to build a lead. Then it was a matter of what to do with that lead.

“When you’re playing sort of the track position game, especially this weekend, it’s like you’re trying to make that window as long as possible,” William Byron said. “So yeah I don’t think we, without the two cautions that happened, the last two cautions, we definitely wouldn’t have had a chance to make it. But those caution laps gave us a window, then I think we were maybe anywhere between one to three laps short. And we were able to save that, mostly in the last like 25 laps of the race once we got a bit of a gap.”

William Byron ended up outlasting the pack to take a comfortable victory. He ran out of fuel doing his burnout celebration after the race.

Razor-thin margins. Of course, Byron has been on the wrong end before.

“I was extremely surprised how much fuel I could save and still make lap time at the end,” he said. “I think I just had enough rear tire left. My rear tires weren’t super hot, so I could kind of just float a lot of speed into the corner and had a good confident entry to the corner once I started doing that.

“I think Iowa was one of those perfect tracks to save some fuel, because you have kind of a short-ish straightaway and long corners. Pocono kind of wraps into that as well. But yeah, I mean we’ve been on the wrong side of it a few times with not saving enough or not having maybe the most accurate way to know when we’re going to run out. Just been improving all that stuff.”