CONCORD, N.C. – The No. 17 HendrickCars.com NASCAR Xfinity Series entry will be back on track for its third start of the season this weekend at Darlington Raceway.
With Friday's practice and qualifying session canceled due to weather in the area and the lineup set by the metric used to determine the qualifying order, William Byron will have to come from the back in Saturday's 147-lap race (1:30 p.m. ET on FS1, MRN Radio, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio-Channel 90). The 26-year-old driver lines up 38th in the 38-car field.
The Darlington race marks Byron's second of his four Xfinity starts of the season. The Charlotte, North Carolina, native also ran the event at Phoenix Raceway in March and has starts at Pocono Raceway (July 13) and Watkins Glen International (Sept. 14) on the horizon. He has one Xfinity start at Darlington, a fifth-place finish in his title-winning 2017 season with Hendrick Motorsports affiliate JR Motorsports. On the NASCAR Cup Series side at the track "Too Tough to Tame," Byron has three straight top-10 finishes and is the defending winner of the spring event.
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For Byron's starts with the No. 17 team, Brandon McSwain, the lead engineer of Byron's No. 24 Cup Series team, will serve as the crew chief. The race at the 1.366-mile track marks his second time atop the box calling the shots for the race.
"Darlington (Raceway) is unique from the historical side and I think it is an awesome place," McSwain told HendrickMotorsports.com. "From an engineering deal, the setup and driver make up much of that place."
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Their work in the Xfinity Series can undoubtedly be informative ahead of Sunday's Cup Series race.
"It gives William (Byron) more track time and me more intel and thought process," McSwain said. "The cars are slightly different but are still conceptually the same deal. It is a race car with four tires on the track, so you can have more engrained details of how a track migrates throughout the event. What are guys doing to find lap times and how can that translate to the Cup side?
"I think it will help us on Sundays with loading our arsenal of tools and expectations. It is a great stepping stone for all of us and you'll see the results pay dividends."
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The last time the No. 17 HendrickCars.com team was on track, Kyle Larson took the car to victory lane with a last-lap pass at Circuit of The Americas (COTA). The victory was the first for Hendrick Motorsports in the Xfinity Series since its return on a part-time basis in 2022 and its first win since 2009.
The No. 17 car number has a rich history with Hendrick Motorsports. NASCAR Hall of Famer Darrell Waltrip drove it to nine wins for the team from 1987 to 1990, including the 1989 DAYTONA 500. Ricky Hendrick also drove the car number in the NASCAR CRAFTSMAN Truck Series in 2000 and 2001. The HendrickCars.com paint scheme is again based on the No. 17 truck driven by Hendrick during his 2001 rookie season.
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The Darlington race is among 10 events for the No. 17 HendrickCars.com team. As noted earlier, the Byron-McSwain duo is running four of those events. For the remainder of the schedule, 2014 Xfinity Series championship-winning crew chief Greg Ives will be calling the shots on the pit box and was the winning crew chief at COTA. Larson will make one more start in the car, while Chase Elliott (two starts – with the first coming in two weeks at Charlotte Motor Speedway on May 25), Alex Bowman (one start) and Boris Said (one said) will also drive the car.
As a company, Hendrick Motorsports has tallied 27 Xfinity Series wins. The team did not run in the series from 2010 to 2021. Since 2022, the organization has fielded an entry in 12 Xfinity races. In those events, the No. 17 has accumulated four pole positions, one win, seven top-five finishes (including three runner-up results) and eight top-10s.