By David Morgan, Associate Editor
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Defending Daytona 500 champion William Byron posted the fast time in NASCAR Cup Series practice on Friday, leading a train of Chevrolets with a lap of 46.172 seconds in the session that was shortened to 30 minutes due to rain.
Byron’s Hendrick Motorsports teammate Chase Elliott was second on the board, followed by Ricky Stenhouse, Jr., Kyle Busch, and Austin Dillon.
“I got a few pushes from Chase (Elliott) and we were able to kind of set a gap and get some fast pushes,” said Byron.
“We were making some fast laps, so the pace was up. That was great to see because if you’re out there a second off the pace, it’s not really super indicative. It did feel like a lot of the changes we made to our car were directionally great. The car was a bit of a handful in the Duel obviously and a lot of that was just because of what we did to qualify. I feel like we kind of got back to our race setup and our normal stuff, and everything felt great.
“Just optimistic, really. I think this is a lot better car than I had here last year, just being our primary and having some speed on our side, hopefully. I’m excited.”
Zane Smith was the fastest of the Fords in sixth-place, along with Todd Gilliland and Joey Logano in seventh and eighth-place, respectively.
Smith was among several cars that had to make repairs from the Duels on Thursday night, with his team electing to fix his No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford instead of going to a back-up.
“In qualifying and I guess our little practice we had to start the weekend I immediately had speed. Unfortunately, last night we blew a right-front. I must have run something over,” Smith said of his issues in the Duels.
“When we were first diagnosing the car, it sounded like a backup just with the amount of things that were bent. Then we were having conversations about where our backup would have been our Atlanta primary and how crazy Sunday is gonna get and you don’t want to dig yourself too big of a hole to start the year, so we kind of dug in deeper looking at our car and realized it was definitely fixable.
“We went out with probably a group of, I guess all of Penske, the FRM teammates and had some Chevys tag along and it drove fine. No issues at all. I was a little worried.
“I was hoping to kind of do a single car run, one or two laps by myself in case something was gonna fall off, but I was put right in the middle of 12 or so, hence probably the lap time we put down, but everything was good. I’m happy about that and excited for Sunday.”
Kyle Larson and Ryan Blaney rounded out the top-10 fastest in practice.
After posting the fastest times in single car qualifying, the Toyotas were only able to muster the 14th fastest time, which went to Legacy Motor Club driver John Hunter Nemechek.
“I didn’t like the way, necessarily, that our car drove last night to be completely honest with you,” Nemechek said.
“We made a lot of changes. We were able to look at the 43’s (Erik Jones) set-up and kind of go more that direction of what he had. He was probably the best car out of our group last night in the Duels. Definitely fought some things handling wise on my end, but after practice today, you are only with six or seven cars there – what we were drafting with.
“It is a little different than a full pack setting, but I feel better today after the adjustments that we made, so hopefully that is a good thing for condition wise where we are going to racing with on Sunday.”
Only one practice session remains for the drivers and teams to get their cars dialed in before Sunday’s main event, with final practice scheduled for 3:05 pm ET on FOX Sports 2.
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