By: Zach Arnold

MARTINSVILLE, Virginia — Everyone expected Hendrick Motorsports to bring four strong cars to Martinsville Speedway for the eighth race of the 2024 season. The event happened to fall on their 40th Anniversary, and a 1-2-3 finish solidified a special day for the Chevrolet team.

As laps were winding down, it felt safe to say William Byron had the win locked up until a long green flag run during stage three was halted with three laps remaining in the race, setting up an overtime finish.

During this caution, the entire field elected to stay out except for the No. 11 team in Denny Hamlin. The crew gave up their fourth-place position on track for new tires. This did not work out well as the 43-year-old finished outside the top ten, in 11th.

Byron and the No. 24 team held off an aggressive Chase Elliott on the restart to secure the win. HMS recorded a top-three with Byron, Kyle Larson, and Elliott.

After the race, Elliott spoke on how his final restart went, ” Came off [turn] four there in the [restart] zone and just couldn’t make it stick there on the outside, got into three and tried to root him up off the bottom and went to get the power down to get up underneath him [Byron], I just couldn’t do it.”

Kyle Larson applauded HMS on a huge accomplishment with the 1-2-3 finish in saying, “Really happy for the Hendrick family, everybody who has been involved in this company from the beginning, there’s 1,500 people here off turn two from Hendrick Motorsports and their families, I knew us four guys were going to have a shot at a good run, didn’t know that we would run 1-2-3.

Hamlin and Wallace were the two Toyota drivers who were able to challenge Logano and the HMS leaders. Wallace fought around the top five all day, but never had the speed to take the lead.

In stage two, a different strategy worked as Joey Logano took two tires instead of four during a pit stop and held off the leaders who took four fresh new stickers. Logano went over 180 laps on the left-side tires that he began the race with before changing them

Sunday’s race only had three cautions due to incident/debris. The two cautions for incidents involved Christopher Bell and John Hunter Nemechek. Both drivers resulted in poor positions, 35th and 36th. The other caution was for debris which happened on Lap 114.

NASCAR heads to Texas Motor Speedway for the ninth Cup Series race in 2024. Tune into FS1 at 3:30 pm EST to catch the action at the 1.5-mile track.