William Byron Dominated A Sloppy NASCAR iRacing Event At Bristol

The third race of the NASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series took drivers to Bristol Motor Speedway for the biggest challenge yet in virtual racing. Homestead and Texas had both proved tricky enough, as drivers struggled with the lack of feel, but short-track racing figured to bring a lot of yellow flags and cause tempers to flare and, sure enough, it delivered

The first wreck of the day came on lap 2 and that set the tone for a sloppy, choppy race in which Bubba Wallace rage quit 15 laps in, Daniel Suarez and Kyle Larson were black flagged and ejected for trying to wreck each other (the second straight week this has happened to Suarez), and, eventually, pole winner William Byron took home the victory in a fairly dominant showing in which he lived near the front of the field throughout.

The Larson-Suarez incident saw the two trying to take each other out a few times, including well after the yellow flag had been waived, with Suarez offering his thoughts on what happened afterwards on Twitter.

There were well over a dozen incidents throughout the race as it was rare to get a long stretch of green flag racing (not all that dissimilar to actual Bristol events, but still more yellows than usual given the short 150 lap race). Byron was able to avoid all of those and cruise to a win, taking off on restarts by taking advantage of iRacing allowing the leader to get going as soon as the pace car pulls off the track, and putting forth simply a dominating performance that, aside from a few times where guys didn’t pit, he ran out front much of the day.