Watch Austin Cindric crash, take out Daytona 500 champion William Byron at NASCAR Atlanta race
William Byron will not start the NASCAR season with two wins.
Byron, the back-to-back Daytona 500 winner, got caught up in a crash on lap 258 of the scheduled 260 in Sunday's Ambetter Health 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Austin Cindric was stuck behind Kyle Larson and drove his No. 2 Team Penske Ford into the fence, spun out and took out Byron coming out of turn 2. The two slid down the backstretch and hit the inside wall.
Byron was able to drive his car back to pit road but had heavy damage. Cindric was towed back to the garage with heavy front end damage.
Byron was trying to become the first driver since Matt Kenseth in 2009 to win the first two races of the season.
Sunday's race will end in overtime.
Follow sports writer Austin Chastain on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @ChastainAJ or reach him via email at achastain@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: NASCAR Atlanta race: Austin Cindric, William Byron crash
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
Steve Lauletta Details 23XI Racing's Growth In 2025
Bubba Wallace, driver of the No. 23 McDonald's Toyota and Tyler Reddick, driver of the No. 45 Nasty ... More Beast Toyota race during the Nascar Cup Series Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on February 16, 2025 in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images) When 23XI Racing announced it was expanding to three full-time entries with the addition of rookie Riley Herbst, it showed the entire sport that this team has its eyes set on the future. The expansion raised eyebrows as 23XI expanding its existing relationship with Monster Energy, and it also gave Toyota another entry. But 23XI operates differently compared to every other team in the Nascar Cup Series. Even the company's social media appears different, having the look of an epic sports dynasty. 'We have a younger, more diverse fan base at 23XI that are interested in music, fashion, sneakers, food, art and all of those things,' 23XI Racing President Steve Lauletta said. 'We want to show up at all of those places.' Team co-owners Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan are in the midst of a complicated antitrust lawsuit with Front Row Motorsports against Nascar. As of now, 23XI Racing has three charters and their status is in flux. But they are operating as business as usual at the moment. In its first year as a three-car team, 23XI's performance has been up and down. All three drivers are winless. Bubba Wallace has shown more raw speed, but poor luck has resulted in an average finish of 18.7, while Tyler Reddick is still winless. Rookie Herbst is 34th in the standings, the third lowest of all full-time drivers. For the first time, 23XI fielded four cars with full-time Craftsman Truck Series driver Corey Heim driving the No. 67 car at Kansas and Nashville. In doing so, the team welcomed yet another duo of new sponsors, Robinhood and Chief's. 'We took on a lot by going to a third full-time car this year,' Lauletta said. 'We wanted to make sure we didn't distract or take away our focus from what we were doing for our first four years with Tyler and Bubba. "Having the ability to sign a development talent like Corey Heim had us know we'd have a fourth car and get him some seat time in the Cup Series. It gave a lot of our folks at Air Speed a chance to go to the racetrack. Yes, it's extra work for all of us, but it's important for us to continue the development of what 23XI is on and off the track.' 23XI Racing has made a name for itself for welcoming new partners to Nascar since its inception in 2021. The team inked major partnerships with companies like Door Dash and Columbia Sportswear, amongst others as the years have gone on. 'We try to be innovative and different in everything we do,' Lauletta said. 'It's how we think and deliver to our partners and how we build our brand. I've said since the beginning that our goal is to build a brand in 23XI that happens to be a race team, not a race team brand. It's proven that our fan base is different from the core Nascar fan.' Last year, Reddick captured the regular season points title and qualified for the Championship 4 for the first time in team history. While he didn't win it all, it showed the team is plenty capable of competing for championships. 'We're capable of winning a lot of races,' Lauletta said. 'Denny laid out a five-year plan when we started building this team in late 2020, and that was by 2025 to be a consistent race-winning team and championship-contending team. We got there in four years, and we need to continue that growth.' Even with the tough luck through 15 races, Reddick and Wallace are sixth and 10th in the standings, respectively.
Washington Post
2 hours ago
- Washington Post
NASCAR goes south of the border to grow fan base with its 1st Cup Series race in Mexico City
NASCAR's first international Cup Series race of the modern era is all about the eyeballs, specifically new fans in the Mexico City market. NASCAR will be on the track Friday for the first of three days of racing at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodríguez, one of the most popular stops on the Formula 1 calendar and Ben Kennedy's newest project. The great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., Kennedy has taken the family business beyond its comfortable confines before. Kennedy in 2022 moved the preseason exhibition Clash from its longtime home at Daytona International Speedway in Florida to a temporary track built inside Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum . Kennedy this year moved the Clash to The Madhouse — the historic Bowman Gray Stadium, which had last hosted a Cup race in 1971, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. NASCAR under Kennedy also returned to North Wilkesboro Speedway in North Carolina for the first time since 1977 when the All-Star race was moved there three years ago. He allowed dirt at Bristol Motor Speedway, a hybrid road course and oval at Charlotte Motor Speedway, alongside his biggest undertaking: NASCAR's first street race, held in downtown Chicago. He also had his eyes set on expanding internationally, which will come Sunday with the first points-paying international race in the Cup Series since 1958. It is only third time in 77 years that NASCAR's top series will run an event that counts in the championship outside the United States. The last two times were in Canada; the Cup Series also has held exhibitions in Japan and Australia. 'Our biggest opportunity to grow as a sport is international,' Kennedy said when he announced Mexico City was replacing one of the two races on the schedule allocated to Richmond International Raceway. 'The U.S. is always going to be our mainstay and our next opportunity was to expand internationally,' he said. 'We said we've wanted to do this for a long time, but also needed to make sure it was the right time, the right partners and the right location. Mexico City checked every box. To be in one of the biggest cities globally — over 20 million people that live in the city — is a massive opportunity for us to bring the sport.' The weekend includes the second-tier Xfinity Series and the NASCAR Mexico Series. It's a strong return to a market that devours the entire F1 weekend ticket package within an hour of them becoming available. Mexicans have proven to be rabid motorsports fans but haven't gotten a chance to see NASCAR's big names since 2008, the final year of a four-year run of Xfinity races. Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. were winners during the four-year stretch. Daniel Suarez, the former Xfinity champion and native of Monterrey, is NASCAR's face of the event. He raced the circuit 13 times with a different layout in the NASCAR Mexico Series, and three of Suarez's starts were wins. 'I'm super excited for the event. I'm super excited to live the moment because the first time is going to only happen once,' Suarez said. 'I'm really trying to be as present as possible, enjoy the moment and try to execute the best possible weekend that we can. We know that we are capable of winning the race, but that's not the goal. The goal is the execution of the entire weekend, and hopefully the win is the result of the execution part.' The planning that has gone into Mexico City, one of 38 events on the Cup schedule, began about a year ago. NASCAR has worked on myriad details, beginning with how to get nearly 200 trucks hauling race cars and equipment from Michigan International Speedway into Mexico City. NASCAR official Tom Bryant has spearheaded the organizational logistics and made multiple trips to the border crossing in Laredo, Texas, to meet with customs officials from both nations. The drive from Michigan to Mexico City is about 40 hours, not including the tedious customs crossing, where all the equipment and tools on every NASCAR hauler must be documented on an exhaustive manifest. Cup Series teams cars were scheduled for a Monday night arrival at Laredo, with crossing scheduled for Tuesday and arrival at the track on Thursday. 'It's been a ton of coordination moving lots of people and lots of stuff safely and efficiently across a great distance and an international border,' Bryant said on the 'Hauler Talk' NASCAR podcast. 'There is a lot to it, but the key to it is you just have to define the problem. We've got to get these people and these things from this point to that point within a certain time period,' he said. 'How do we do it in a way that's going to best position us to be ready to go to work as soon as we hit the ground down there? Because this is a pretty tight window.' ___ AP auto racing:
2 hours ago
NASCAR goes south of the border to grow fan base with its 1st Cup Series race in Mexico City
NASCAR's first international Cup Series race of the modern era is all about the eyeballs, specifically new fans in the Mexico City market. NASCAR will be on the track Friday for the first of three days of racing at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodríguez, one of the most popular stops on the Formula 1 calendar and Ben Kennedy's newest project. The great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., Kennedy has taken the family business beyond its comfortable confines before. Kennedy in 2022 moved the preseason exhibition Clash from its longtime home at Daytona International Speedway in Florida to a temporary track built inside Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Kennedy this year moved the Clash to The Madhouse — the historic Bowman Gray Stadium, which had last hosted a Cup race in 1971, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. NASCAR under Kennedy also returned to North Wilkesboro Speedway in North Carolina for the first time since 1977 when the All-Star race was moved there three years ago. He allowed dirt at Bristol Motor Speedway, a hybrid road course and oval at Charlotte Motor Speedway, alongside his biggest undertaking: NASCAR's first street race, held in downtown Chicago. He also had his eyes set on expanding internationally, which will come Sunday with the first points-paying international race in the Cup Series since 1958. It is only third time in 77 years that NASCAR's top series will run an event that counts in the championship outside the United States. The last two times were in Canada; the Cup Series also has held exhibitions in Japan and Australia. 'Our biggest opportunity to grow as a sport is international,' Kennedy said when he announced Mexico City was replacing one of the two races on the schedule allocated to Richmond International Raceway. 'The U.S. is always going to be our mainstay and our next opportunity was to expand internationally," he said. "We said we've wanted to do this for a long time, but also needed to make sure it was the right time, the right partners and the right location. Mexico City checked every box. To be in one of the biggest cities globally — over 20 million people that live in the city — is a massive opportunity for us to bring the sport.' The weekend includes the second-tier Xfinity Series and the NASCAR Mexico Series. It's a strong return to a market that devours the entire F1 weekend ticket package within an hour of them becoming available. Mexicans have proven to be rabid motorsports fans but haven't gotten a chance to see NASCAR's big names since 2008, the final year of a four-year run of Xfinity races. Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. were winners during the four-year stretch. Daniel Suarez, the former Xfinity champion and native of Monterrey, is NASCAR's face of the event. He raced the circuit 13 times with a different layout in the NASCAR Mexico Series, and three of Suarez's starts were wins. 'I'm super excited for the event. I'm super excited to live the moment because the first time is going to only happen once,' Suarez said. "I'm really trying to be as present as possible, enjoy the moment and try to execute the best possible weekend that we can. We know that we are capable of winning the race, but that's not the goal. The goal is the execution of the entire weekend, and hopefully the win is the result of the execution part.' The planning that has gone into Mexico City, one of 38 events on the Cup schedule, began about a year ago. NASCAR has worked on myriad details, beginning with how to get nearly 200 trucks hauling race cars and equipment from Michigan International Speedway into Mexico City. NASCAR official Tom Bryant has spearheaded the organizational logistics and made multiple trips to the border crossing in Laredo, Texas, to meet with customs officials from both nations. The drive from Michigan to Mexico City is about 40 hours, not including the tedious customs crossing, where all the equipment and tools on every NASCAR hauler must be documented on an exhaustive manifest. Cup Series teams cars were scheduled for a Monday night arrival at Laredo, with crossing scheduled for Tuesday and arrival at the track on Thursday. 'It's been a ton of coordination moving lots of people and lots of stuff safely and efficiently across a great distance and an international border,' Bryant said on the 'Hauler Talk' NASCAR podcast. 'There is a lot to it, but the key to it is you just have to define the problem. We've got to get these people and these things from this point to that point within a certain time period," he said. "How do we do it in a way that's going to best position us to be ready to go to work as soon as we hit the ground down there? Because this is a pretty tight window.'
