CONCORD, N.C. -- Kyle Larson and William Byron both were on the cusp of winning Sunday’s event at Pocono Raceway but unfortunate circumstances held off the two Hendrick Motorsports teammates from claiming the checkered flag.
Byron had the lead until the last two laps when he had to get a splash of fuel to make it to the end of the race. He went from being in first to finishing 12th after a caution on lap 93 forced the field to restart.
“We definitely had the fastest car. The caution didn’t fit us perfectly,” Byron said. “We had control of the race there and were right on our number to make it or not, but it just didn’t work out. We had a really fast car. The Axalta Chevrolet was awesome. It sucks to lose like that, but I feel like we had everything we needed in the car. We just couldn’t save enough fuel as far back as we were.”
Larson also had a tall order for Sunday’s race after he had to start from the rear. He was forced to go to a backup car from damage sustained to his No. 5 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE from Saturday’s race and was slow to move up the leaderboard.
It wasn’t until the final part of stage three that Larson was close enough to taste victory, but winner Kyle Busch had too much of a lead for Larson to catch up by the time the race ended, earning him his fifth runner-up result this year.
“It's surprising finish for us,” Larson said. “Our HendrickCars.com Chevy was really loose for a majority of the race, then we got a lot of nose damage there on one of the restarts. (The car) was off on speed, I felt like, after that."
Unlike the frontrunners, Larson had a little more fuel left at “The Tricky Triangle” than the cars in front of him. He saw Busch’s teammate Denny Hamlin pit in the final laps after he started to run out of fuel and relied on crew chief Cliff Daniels’ guidance to wisely get him to the checkered flag.
“The 18 (Busch) did pit a lap after us under caution. That probably won them the race,” Larson explained. “(A) second-place finish, I thought we would be outside of the top 20. A lot of points throughout the race; we'll take it. (I’m) happy about the effort for sure all weekend.”
While Pocono didn’t pan out with a win for Larson and Byron, they both earned a top-five finish and Larson also secured a top-10 result from his effort on Saturday. Overall, Larson is a mere two points behind the NASCAR Cup Series points leader while Byron sits in third in the standings.