{"id":7995,"date":"2020-04-06T19:52:14","date_gmt":"2020-04-06T23:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonmotorsport.com\/?p=7995"},"modified":"2020-04-06T19:52:14","modified_gmt":"2020-04-06T23:52:14","slug":"william-byron-dominates-nbcsn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/2020\/04\/06\/william-byron-dominates-nbcsn\/","title":{"rendered":"William Byron dominates NBCSN iRacing Debut"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>William Byron<\/strong> earned the victory on Sunday&#8217;s NASCAR Pro Invitational iRacing event at Bristol and took off right where he left off from there on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>The iRacing veteran helped debut NBCSN&#8217;s new short track series scheduled for this week by dominating the six-car field at Rockingham Speedway.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>William Byron dominates NBCSN iRacing Debut<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>In the first of two, twin 35-lap races at the track, Byron made himself a big gap apart from the rest of the six-car field, along with\u00a0<strong>Parker Kligerman\u00a0<\/strong>who stuck to his back bumper, early on.<\/p>\n<p>Kligerman looked like he might give Byron a fight, but he was ultimately outdueled after burning out his right-front tire.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I thought I figured out what he was doing in the first 10 laps there, but he just decided to go and drive away,&#8221; Kligerman said on the NBCSN broadcast.<\/p>\n<p>Byron went on to win the race by over three seconds, and the gap between Kligerman was actually the same size.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Race 1 Results<\/strong><br \/>\n1. William Byron<br \/>\n2. Parker Kligerman<br \/>\n3. Kyle Busch<br \/>\n4. Tyler Reddick<br \/>\n5. Austin Dillon<br \/>\n6. Bubba Wallace<\/p>\n<p>The field was inverted for the second race, so Wallace and Dillon would start on the front row.<\/p>\n<p>It would very quickly change in the favor of the two that were fastest in race one, though.<\/p>\n<p>Wallace jumped to the front and watched\u00a0<strong>Austin Dillon\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0<strong>Tyler Reddick\u00a0<\/strong>get tangled up on the first lap of the race. Dillon had bumped the wall and took Reddick directly off the track.<\/p>\n<p>From then on, it was a four-car battle.<\/p>\n<p>Wallace led for a handful of laps, but eventually ran out of tread on his right front tire and dropped back. The same happened for\u00a0<strong>Kyle Busch<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>With 16 laps to go, it was Byron on the bumper of Kligerman, but the driver of the 24 would wait until the final turn to make his move.<\/p>\n<p>Byron hit the bumper of Kligerman and whipped past him for first place, sweeping the pair of races and advancing to Thursday&#8217;s championship at Martinsville.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Race 2 Results<\/strong><br \/>\n1. William Byron<br \/>\n2. Parker Kligerman<br \/>\n3. Kyle Busch<br \/>\n4. Bubba Wallace<br \/>\n5. Austin Dillon<br \/>\n6. Tyler Reddick<\/p>\n<p>The network said during the broadcast that 10 drivers will fill the field of Thursday&#8217;s championship, and any spots not filled by automatic qualifiers &#8211; the winners from the races this week &#8211; will be picked by\u00a0<strong>Steve Letarte\u00a0<\/strong>and the other NBCSN analysts.<\/p>\n<p>Letarte chose Busch to join Byron on Thursday, and the NBCSN guys will choose four more, at least, after Wednesday&#8217;s racing to fill out the field.<\/p>\n<p>The series will return to the virtual track on Tuesday with a new set of six drivers set to try and punch their tickets to the championship event at Martinsville on Thursday. It will again start at 7:00 p.m. ET on NBCSN.<\/p>\n<p>For more updates on the <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonmotorsport.com\/2020\/04\/02\/iracing-short-track-series\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">series<\/a>, please visit our department&#8217;s Twitter account at <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/RacingVault\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@RacingVault.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>William Byron earned the victory on Sunday&#8217;s NASCAR Pro Invitational iRacing event at Bristol and took off right where he left off from there on Monday. The iRacing veteran helped debut NBCSN&#8217;s new short track series scheduled for this week by dominating the six-car field at Rockingham Speedway. William Byron dominates NBCSN iRacing Debut In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":315,"featured_media":7984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1370,7,5],"tags":[384,14,60],"class_list":["post-7995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-iracing","category-more-racing","category-nascar","tag-iracing","tag-nascar","tag-william-byron"],"modified_by":"Connor Ferguson","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/315"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/motorsports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}