Saturday's motors: Byron is back in Texas with more wins since getting Hendrick's 300th

Fort Worth, Texas — When William Byron first met Rick Hendrick a decade ago, the teenager who had learned racing on a computer wasn't all that confident how things would work out as he revealed his goal to drive one day for the NASCAR team owner.

There is certainly no lack of confidence now for Byron, who at 26 is getting race wins for NASCAR's winningest team, and some significant ones at that. A week after Byron's 13th career win in a 1-2-3 finish for Hendrick Motorsports at Martinsville as the team marked the 40th anniversary of its first victory, the series is back at Texas, where he led only the final six laps last September to get Hendrick's 300th victory.

“For me, just felt like a full-circle moment. Just with all the history of Martinsville, with being in the 24 (car) …. talking to Rick on the phone and then going to celebrate with him,” Byron said Saturday.

Byron, who qualified sixth at Texas, opened this season by winning the Daytona 500, the record-matching ninth for Hendrick but first since 2014. He also won three weeks ago in the other Texas race in Austin.

Hendrick teammate Kyle Larson is the points leader and earned the pole for Sunday's race at Texas, a 1 1/2-mile track like Las Vegas, where he got his victory this season. He led 99 laps at Texas last fall but got loose and spun into the wall with 85 laps to go. Larson won from the pole in the 2021 fall race there, where he also won NASCAR's All-Star race there earlier that year.

“It’s always been a really good racetrack for me,” Larson said. “Last year, I just screwed up on one of the late restarts and spun and crashed, but we had a dominant race car that day. Hopefully we’ll have another race car just like it.”

Larson's 18 wins since joining Hendrick in 2021 include the team's record-setting 269th victory that year at Charlotte Motor Speedway to pass Petty Enterprises for the most.

Byron grew up in NASCAR’s hotbed of Charlotte, North Carolina, and idolized seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson in the No. 48 car for Hendrick. Now Byron is in his seventh season in the famed No. 24 that Jeff Gordon drove to win four Cup titles and 93 races.

“I was put into Jeff’s car and that was a lot of pressure. And I had to just, we had to, kind of make it our own,” Byron said. “Jeff is a great mentor and a great asset for our team. … He’s made it known when I got in the car that it’s my own."

After getting to victory lane for the first time in his 98th start, in 2020, Byron got another win in 2021 and two more in 2022 before a Cup-high six wins last year. His three victories this season are on drastically different tracks – the 2 1/2-mile tri-oval at Daytona, the road course in Austin and that half-mile paperclip at Martinsville.

“I think I started a little bit slower than I wanted to start. I feel like some of that was just chemistry and just learning the Cup Series as a whole, and I probably just didn’t get the most out of those first couple of years that I would like to,” Byron said. “Once we started winning races in the third year, won a race, and then the next year we won another one and really started to win races at places that are difficult to win, I just felt like we started to click."

Xfinity

Sam Mayer made a last-lap pass and held on to win by a matter of inches and less than a second ahead of Ryan Sieg at Texas Motor Speedway in one of the closest finishes in NASCAR Xfinity Series history on Saturday.

Mayer was high against the outside wall after the two cars banged side-by-side on the way to the checkered flag. The final margin of .002 seconds matched the second-closest finish in series history.

“That’s unreal. I mean I was like a second and a half back probably at one point. So to make up that much time in that little amount of time is certainly unreal,” Mayer said. “We led the most important lap. … We didn’t dominate by any means, but we certainly worked our tails off to get to that point to win like that.”

Justin Allgaier finished third after leading 117 of the race's 200 laps.

Sieg went from 10th place to first in a span of four laps just before the race's final caution and led 17 consecutive laps. After the restart with 11 to go, he stayed in front until the final lap when Mayer was able to get the No. 1 JR Motorsports Chevrolet under and by him on the backstretch.

Off the final turn, Sieg got back to the inside of Mayer but came up just short in the No. 39 Ford of getting his first win in 342 career starts since 2013 for the RSS Racing team owned by his family.

“The first emotion is definitely disappointment. We had it. We were leading at the end," Sieg said. "We got up front but we just got too tight. I was doing all I could do. I was changing lines, changing brakes, changing everything. It was just that close. I saw him coming. I was doing all I could do. In the end I was just trying to run him into the wall to win the race. We were just so close.”

It was the fifth career win for Mayer, and his first this season. He led four different times for a total of only five laps.

AJ Allmendinger was fourth, followed by Cole Custer, Austin Hill, Ryan Truex, Sammy Smith, Jess Love and Anthony Alfredo.