William Byron’s Crew Chief Snubs Daytona 500 Title, Reveals Cannonball Baker’s Honors Importance

William Byron created history in the first race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series when he became a Daytona 500 winner for the first time. However, all of the credit doesn’t go to the driver of the #24. A lot of it also goes to its passionate crew chief, Rudy Fugle. The crew chief who wins the Great American Race gets bestowed with the Cannonball Baker Trophy each year the day after the race at Daytona.

However, that was not the case this year, and the veteran crew chief was not complaining about it. Instead, he used the opportunity to honor everyone who worked on the car at Hendrick Motorsports. Rather, he was an emotional man after failing to win the championship last year.

Rudy Fugle talks about his first time with honors 

The Cannonball Baker Trophy is presented along with the Hatlet J. Earl Trophy, which is awarded to the Daytona 500 driver. In this case, it was William Byron. He picked up where he left off last year in a lot of ways, and Rudy Fugle deserves a lot of credit for that. The Byron-Fugle partnership has been a huge success so far for Hendrick Motorsports.

It’s not just the crew chief who works on a car. Several people work tirelessly to make sure that a car is fine-tuned as well as possible, and a lot of them don’t even get to make it to the track, let alone get the spotlight. Well, when the Cannonball Baker Trophy was awarded to Fugle at the Hendrick Motorsports shop after the Daytona 500, he took the opportunity to honor everyone who worked to make the car as fast as possible.

“It was my first time winning the Daytona 500 as crew chief, but even being in the whole presentation, so, yeah, I know it’s probably different if you would have experienced in Daytona, but for us, it was kind of what we expected. It was good to have it here, we got to have some more team members to go to the event, the award, and the lunch, which was good. Anytime you get to involve more people that helped build the car and do everything that make us go fast and keep us employed, it’s fun to have them there, so that part was great,” he said in a recent episode of the NASCAR Live podcast.

While the veteran was left speechless after his big victory at Daytona, he has not been happy with NASCAR of late. The organizers have already received a lot of criticism for scraping practice on superspeedways except Daytona, but changes in the Phoenix schedule have left a lot of people seething.

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William Byron’s crew chief slams NASCAR for an unrealistic Phoenix schedule 

The Cup Series race will have a 50-minute practice session for the race, but the issue is that crews will only have 90 minutes between the end of the session and the technical inspection to get driver feedback and make the car as competitive as possible without breaking any rules. William Byron’s crew chief ridiculed this directive, stating that crew members have often needed to stay up overnight to get things like that sorted. 90 minutes will never be enough time for that.

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“Normally we would have 50 minutes, you start working on the car, and you have overnight, which the engineers and myself would probably stay up for most of the night. You’re going to be limited on what you’re gonna be able to change after practice, so what our practice plan will be knowing the things we can change in an hour and a half. Because we most likely have to change brakes in an hour and a half. So we’re going to be packed just getting the car ready to race, let alone getting it ready for inspection and changing things so, really all of us as a GM group will work on different little things that we can share,” he said.

“I think in addition to normal changes, will be springs cambers tows and geometries and stuff like that, you’re not gonna have a ton of time to change…as soon as we heard about it, we were begging for reprieve. But I don’t know what the deal is..that’s what they want,” Rudy Fugle added.

This decision has ruffled a lot of feathers, and it will almost certainly affect several drivers and teams who will struggle to get things right within 90 minutes. It would not be surprising if some title favorites ended up running toward the back of the pack as a result. How do you think the race will pan out? Let us know your thoughts.