It took 22 races, but William Byron finally pulled through for his second win of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season as he held off Chase Briscoe, Brad Keselowski, and Ryan Blaney while managing a fuel tank that was running on fumes in the closing laps of Sunday’s Iowa Corn 350 Powered by Ethanol at Iowa Speedway.
Race Results:
Iowa Corn 350 Powered by Ethanol
“Man, how about that for some fuel mileage,” Byron quipped in his USA Network victory interview. “We’ve had our fair share of things not go our way with fuel mileage, and just super thankful for Rudy, all these guys, all the engineers, all the engineers back at the shop. Just this whole race team, we’ve been through a lot this year. It’s been a lot of growing pains. It’s been tough on us. But it feels really good today to get a win.”
With the win, the 15th of Byron’s 275-race NASCAR Cup Series career, the 27-year-old racer regained the NASCAR Cup Series regular-season point lead as he will exit Newton, Iowa, with an 18-point advantage over Chase Elliott with three races until the Playoffs begin.
After the Cracker Barrel 400 at Nashville Superspeedway, the 14th race of the season, Byron had a seemingly insurmountable 49-point lead. However, a rough patch of races, which included finishes of 28th at Michigan, 27th at Pocono, 37th at Atlanta, 40th at the Chicago Street Course, and 31st at Dover, saw Byron’s regular-season championship hopes dwindle.
Finally, the planets aligned for Byron and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team on Sunday.
“Yeah, I think our confidence in each other never wavered. I feel like our speed has been better than it’s ever been, and that’s a big reason why we stay confident,” Byron said. “I feel like every week we work really hard together and show up prepared, show up fast, and yeah, we needed just one to go our way, and today it did.”
While it ended up being the race-winning strategy, Byron and crew chief Rudy Fugle didn’t expect to stretch their fuel tank as long as they did, but when a rash of cautions in the final Stage allowed Byron to save more fuel than expected, they were able to stretch their final fuel load 145 laps, despite the estimated fuel window being just 110 laps.
That put the driver in a position to capitalize by scoring his first win since the season-opening Daytona 500.
Briscoe, who started from the pole for the sixth time this season, was able to hold off a hard-charging Brad Keselowski for the runner-up spot. For the driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, this marked his fourth top-two finish over his last seven starts.
The racer was happy to nab another good finish, but was disappointed in himself for hampering the day of two fellow Toyota drivers, Tyler Reddick and Christopher Bell, due to a Lap 253 incident.
“First off, just want to apologize to the 45 and 20,” Briscoe said. “That was a really boneheaded move on my part, and got in there and got loose and ruined their day. That’s 100 percent on me.”
As for the finish of the race, he felt he was in the perfect spot as he was closing in on Byron. But as we see far too often with the Next Gen car, his runs would stall out in dirty air, and he could never do anything with Byron.
“There at the end, I was running William down. I thought I was really in the catbird seat there, and I just got there and kind of stalled out,” Briscoe explained. “I kind of experienced that when I was leading earlier. I caught the back of the field, and same thing; as soon as I got there, I just kind of died.”
While it wasn’t a season-saving win, Brad Keselowski had his best complete race of the 2025 campaign on Sunday as he came home third after leading 68 laps in an effort that saw the driver of the No. 6 RFK Racing Ford Mustang Dark Horse sweep winning Stages 1 and 2, and he collected the bonus point for achieving the Xfinity Fastest Lap.
Keselowski, who pitted for the final time on Lap 230, needed a little bit of help from the caution flags in order to work himself into a spot where he could make it to the finish on fuel, which he got. However, there were more cautions than he needed, which allowed Byron and Briscoe, who finished ahead of him, to get to the finish as well.
“Just the way the yellows fell. We had so many yellows there in Stage 3 that it got [Byron] and [Briscoe] to where they could make it on fuel pitting way outside the window, and we just couldn’t get back by them,” Keselowski said. “Got back by a lot of guys; restarted, I think 24th there after we pitted, and got all the way up to third, but that was as far as I could get.”
While it wasn’t a win, Keselowski was proud of his RFK Racing team, which had two cars inside of the top-five of the final running order on Sunday.
“Yeah, great run for both of our RFK cars. Obviously we want to win, but we’re in contention, that’s for sure,” Keselowski said.
Ryan Blaney was closing in fast on Keselowski and Briscoe in the closing laps, but settled for a fourth-place finish in his defense of his win at Iowa Speedway a season ago, and Ryan Preece finished fifth in the No. 60 RFK Racing Ford.
Bubba Wallace rallied from two laps down after suffering a bent toe link in a late-race incident, to finish sixth. It was a solid follow up to last week’s win in the Brickyard 400 for the 23XI Racing driver.
Alex Bowman, Carson Hocevar, Joey Logano, and Austin Dillon rounded out the top-10 finishers in Sunday’s Iowa Corn 350.
With Byron winning, it meant we remain at 13 different winners in the NASCAR Cup Series season, which means there are still three Playoff berths up for grabs by drivers attempting to point their way in or win their way in over the next three races.
With three races remaining in the regular-season, Tyler Reddick holds a 122-point advantage over Ryan Preece, the first driver outside of the Playoff cutline. Alex Bowman is 63 points above the cutline, while Chris Buescher is the final driver inside of the 16-driver Playoff Grid at 23 points above the cutline.
Preece (-23 points), Kyle Busch (-73), Ty Gibbs (-87), and AJ Allmendinger (-118) are the top-four drivers outside of the Playoffs, currently, in the NASCAR Cup Series point standings.
Next up for the NASCAR Cup Series is the Go Bowling at The Glen at Watkins Glen International on Sunday, August 10. That event will be televised on USA Network with the broadcast set to kick off at 2:00 PM ET. The Motor Racing Network (MRN) and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide the radio broadcast of the event.
Chris Buescher is the defending winner of the Go Bowling at The Glen.
