William Byron goes from racing video game ace to the top dog at Iowa Speedway

NEWTON — There were enough spins in the final stage of Sunday’s Iowa Corn 350 to make you dizzy.

After just one caution in the first 170 laps, it was a spin-o-rama with 11 yellow flags after that. The 12 total tied the NASCAR Cup Series season-high. Shane Van Gisbergen, an Australian with three wins on the Cup Series’ road courses this year, wasn’t as home down on the farm Sunday with two spins.

Leigh Diffey, the lead announcer on USA Network’s telecast of the race, also is an Aussie. But this thing at Iowa Speedway was pure America, loud and sometimes testy, with country music before the race and confetti afterward.

For so long, getting a Cup Series race here seemed like reaching for an unreachable star. The speedway opened in 2006, had its first IndyCar race here the following year, and welcomed NASCAR’s No. 2 series for the first time in 2011.

NASCAR’s main event, however, was not to be. Until, that is, last year. Now it’s two years in the books of Cup Series races here, two sellouts of 30,000-plus fans. The TV crews have loved making something out of the bucolic background and the short-track turbulence. A third-consecutive year sounds like a strong likelihood.

This may be a race for the rubes here somewhere east of Omaha, but Sunday’s winner was William Byron. That sounds like the name of a 19th Century British poet more than a racecar driver from North Carolina.

Byron didn’t hone his skills as a 7-year-old prodigy racing go-carts, or a teenager putting the hammer down in stock cars on short tracks like Hickory or Hawkeye Downs. Instead, he learned how to become skilled enough to compete against the best of the best via countless hours of iRacing, a video game using an online racing simulator.

“You’re trying the techniques you would use in a real car,” Byron said on Netflix’s NASCAR series, “Full Speed.”

“I would come home from school and get straight on iRacing and I’d run until 10 o’clock at night. My parents, at first they were like ‘This is a huge distraction, you need to get off the computer.’”

As so often happens with parents, the kid has proved them wrong over and over. The 27-year-old has 15 Cup Series wins in eight seasons. This was his first victory since February’s season-opener when he became the first driver to win two straight Daytona 500s since Sterling Marlin in 1994-95.

Sterling Marlin doesn’t really sound like the name of a stock car driver, either. Not to worry. There are still Kyle and Kyle (Larson and Busch), Chase and Chase (Elliott and Briscoe) Ty and Ty (Gibbs and Dillon), and even a Bubba (Wallace).

Sunday in Iowa, however, belonged to young Lord Byron, who has led a whopping 910 laps this year. He is the Cup Series’ regular-season points leader with three races left before the 10-race playoffs begin.

Byron almost ran out of gas. He said he used the last drops while smoking up the front straightaway with burnouts after winning the race.

The week before, Byron did run out of fuel as the white flag flew while in pursuit of the Brickyard 400’s eventual winner, Bubba Wallace. All of Sunday’s final-stage cautions helped Byron keep enough gas in his tank to get to the finish line first, 1.2 seconds ahead of Chase Briscoe.

“He’s an awesome driver,” said Byron’s crew chief, Rudy Fugle about his guy. “I think he’s the best driver all-around in the field right now.

“He’s got the heart of a lion. He fights through everything.”

Byron won a now-Xfinity Truck Series race here in 2016 and an Xfinity Series event here in 2017. He was second in last year’s Iowa Cup Series debut.

“It was awesome today,” Byron said. “The fans, the facility, so clean and nice. I love this area.

“When I was a kid, the iRacing schedule would always line up with the tracks in the summer and I’d have the most time to iRace in the summer. So I would race this track a ton on iRacing. So I feel like that's why it's been a good track for me. I just have thousands of laps kind of in my head of how the rhythm of this place goes.”

Training on a computer to one day take the checkered flag at a racetrack surrounded by cornfields. Ain’t that America?

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com