DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- NASCAR has issued penalties to the No. 24 team of Hendrick Motorsports, which included ejecting crew chief Rudy Fugle for the rest of the weekend at Daytona International Speedway.
NASCAR announced the news with its pre-race inspection report. According to the release, the No. 24 Chevrolet passed inspection on its second attempt on Friday afternoon. The team then made an unapproved adjustment to the splitter. The struts were reinstalled, and the car was rerun over the USS and failed due to the adjustment.
As a result of this infraction, NASCAR took away pit stall selection and sent William Byron to the rear of the field for the start of Saturday's Cup Series race.
Additionally, Byron will have serve a stop-and-go penalty after taking the green flag to start the race. This means he will fall out of the draft and likely drop off the lead lap unless a caution bunches the field back together early in stage 1.
Byron originally had a starting position inside the top 10. Lightning forced NASCAR to cancel qualifying, so none of the drivers headed out onto the 2.5-mile superspeedway for their laps. NASCAR set the lineup by its points metric, which put Byron eighth in the starting order.
With NASCAR ejecting Fugle for the remainder of the weekend, Hendrick Motorsports will take the "next man up" approach. Team engineer Brandon McSwain will step into the role of crew chief as the No. 24 team tries to win at Daytona for the fourth time since 2020.
This penalty disrupts Byron's strategy for the weekend. As the regular-season champion, he didn't have to worry about winning again or battling other drivers for points. However, he wanted to be in position for a stage win that would add another playoff point to his total.
"If we can win a stage, great," Byron said before NASCAR issued the penalty. "We don't need second place points, so we're probably going to be smart about that and how we position for that. But yeah, if we can go out and win a stage, that would be amazing."
The No. 24 team is not the only one that dealt with issues in inspection. The No. 78 team of Live Fast Motorsports failed inspection twice on Friday. NASCAR ejected car chief Lee Leslie for the rest of the weekend and took away pit stall selection.