William Byron had the car to beat all weekend at the EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix, but when the checkered flag fell, nobody could catch the Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 machine.
Byron held off a hard-charging Christopher Bell in the closing laps and managed to outpace the field to complete the perfect weekend, which included being fastest in practice and winning the pole. That pole was the 13th of his career and the first he converted into a victory.
Bell and his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Ty Gibbs finished second and third, respectively, with Hendrick Motorsports’ Alex Bowman finishing fourth and 23XI’s Tyler Reddick in fifth. The performance by Gibbs matched his career-best performance established this season at Phoenix.
“I feel like I made a lot of mistakes in the last 10 laps,” Byron said. “This sport is just so hard. Week in and week out to show up and have fast cars, I’m just thankful for the team I have around me. It’s a lot of fun to win races, but it’s really difficult too.
“It was a really challenging race. It was a really fast middle portion of the race. The 48 (Bowman) was coming on strong, and the 20 (Bell) at the end.”
Despite a late charge, which closed the final margin of victory to just 0.692 seconds, Bell said he would have had a difficult time making a pass for the win.
“It seems like another lap and I would have gotten (to him), for sure,” he said. “Passing him was going to be difficult. I needed him to make a mistake, and he didn’t.”
Byron’s pit crew came up big on the final stop of the day, getting the Charlotte native out three seconds faster than the next closest team and providing the cushion he needed to pull out the victory.
“When we’re on, we’re firing on all cylinders,” Byron said of his team following the race. “We prepared really well this week.”
Byron, who notched six wins in 2023, now has two just six races into his 2024 season. The other came in the season-opening Daytona 500.
Outside of two stage breaks, the 68-lap affair went caution-free.
Bell, already locked into the Playoffs by virtue of a win at Phoenix earlier this season, earned his first-ever stage win at Circuit of The Americas at the end of the first stage, while his teammate Denny Hamlin powered his No. 11 Toyota to victory in the second stage.
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