William Byron crew chief on dislodged wheel incident

He had been hovering around seventh in the championship standings until a summer swoon that has seen him slide to 12th. He’s locked into the Chase for the Championship but the fall cost him a deficit that would have been about 55 points behind Denny Hamlin instead of what could be 75-85 points.

The playoffs take place over the last 10 races.

The weirdest part of the Byron crash was that those left side tires were bolted on the run before, 20 laps earlier, and only after the team came back down to just take right sides.

Crew chief Rudy Fugle called it a freak incident, not a forced mistake, Monday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

Hendrick Motorsports’ William Byron “There’s a lot more to go and look and what not but I would say 9 times out of 10, or even 90 times out of 100, we would watch the video from the left rear change and that lug looks tight,” Fugle said on The Morning Drive. “It snugs up, the gun stops and you get one of these… Other crew chiefs would stop me on pit road and say, 'Hey, shoot, I've had that happen before too,' because they were wondering how that happened. "Basically, the rotor has a rotor hat and it's got drive pins. It has a few drive pins that hold the wheel on with a single lug. Then on the rear side of the wheel there are numerous dry pinholes. "I should know the exact number but let's say there's 18 dry pin holes and there's six or eight drive pin pins on the car side and they just have to align correctly."

The tire changer can give a violent push that causes a miss, says Fugle, and then the jack man has to re-clock the wheel.

"I think what happened is we had it just misaligned twenty thousandths of an inch and it drug a ton of aluminum material against the drive pin and made it feel tight and the gun stopped and felt tight," said Fugle. And then after you do a restart and a couple laps on track where most of the time when you're on track that left rear is trying to pull itself off.

"It just came loose and it was just a super unfortunate situation.

When Fugle watched the video back there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the pitstop. "It's just a crappy set of circumstances, and there is not much we can do," he said.

Fugle and Byron will be missing two pit crew members, probably the changer and jackman for Daytona and the Southern 500. Fugle also praised the depth of the Hendrick Motorsports pit department and said he expected very little competitive impact to his team when the bulk of the playoff races come.