William Byron crew chief details dislodged wheel incident

A frustrating summer for William Byron added another chapter on Sunday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway when he lost a left rear wheel and crashed into the Turn 3 wall while running fourth on Lap 233.

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

The playoffs are contested over the final 10 races.

What was the weirdest thing about the Byron crash is that those left side tires were bolted on the previous run, 20 laps prior, and only after the team came back down to take just right sides.

Crew chief Rudy Fugle chalked it up to a freak incident more than a forced error on Monday on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

William Byron, Hendrick Motorsports

Photo by: Sean Gardner / Getty Images

“I mean there's a lot more to go and look and whatnot, but I would say that 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 then you get one of these …  I had other crew chiefs stop me on pit road to 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's got a handful of drive pins that hold the wheel in place with a single lug. And then, the back face of the wheel has a bunch of dry pin holes. 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.”

Fugle says the tire changer can cause a miss with a violent push and the jack man then 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,” Fugle said. “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 worked its way loose and it was just a super unfortunate circumstance.”

When Fugle watched the video back, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the pit stop. He said it was ‘just a crappy circumstance’ and that not much they could do about it.

As a result, Fugle and Byron will lose two pit crew members, likely 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 their team come the bulk of the playoff races.