This was not the day Rick Hendrick hoped for. Just when the race was shaping up for a straight fight to the finish, it unraveled in turn three, and a lot of frustration quickly pointed toward Hendrick Motorsports.
The stack-up began in heavy traffic with just a handful of laps left. As the field compressed entering the corner, contact triggered a multi-car crash and collected several contenders.
And now William Byron finds himself in the middle of a giant storm. Contact impacted stacked cars quickly, leaving little room to escape on lap 241. William Byron and Joey Logano were among those caught in the initial chain reaction as cars checked up ahead of them.
Moreover, Austin Dillon and Austin Cindric were among those swept up as lanes closed and nowhere remained to escape.
The impact brought out the caution and ultimately a red flag for cleanup, wiping out what had been building toward a regulation finish. Instead of a clean run to the checkout, the race was pushed into overtime and fans weren’t shy about calling sequences terrible and blaming HMS for derailing what many felt could have been a generational ending.
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“Some terrible judgement calls on track today, Byron was definitely not clear to get to pit entry,” one fan wrote, pointing to what they felt was the critical miscalculation that triggered the stack up.
Another added, “That was shaping up to be SUCH a good finish, especially for my 23xi boys,” referencing Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick, especially the strong late race run from Wallace and Company before the caution erased that momentum.
Others did not hold back at all. “Hendrick has done their best to ruin everybody’s day,” one post read, while another quipped, “The Hendrick team meeting tomorrow needs to be ‘there are other drivers on the track.’”
Fair or not, the red flag in overtime reset shifted the narrative instantly, from a potential classic finish to a blame game centred squarely on HMS.