NASCAR CUP SERIES: ADVENTHEALTH 400

April 19, 2026

Billy Scott

Press Conference

An Interview with:

THE MODERATOR: We've been joined by our race-winning crew chief, Billy Scott. We kind of joke about how often we've seen you this season. Five wins. Today had a lot of action there at the end. Just take us through the laps, but really does it mean to be in this position in April? This team is unbeatable at this point.

BILLY SCOTT: Yeah, certainly a wonderful start to the year. We keep coming to the racetrack and having good speed. Tyler keeps figuring out ways to execute flawlessly at the end seemingly to make it happen.

I think it's a good follow-up from the struggles you talked about from last year. Feel like we had a lot of opportunities, never being able to capitalize. Trying to remove ourselves from the expectations of results, just trying to do our job and execute and let things happen as they will.

It's obviously worked out really well.

THE MODERATOR: We'll go to questions for Billy.

Q. Do you have any flashbacks to last fall when Chevrolet kind of squeaked through there?

BILLY SCOTT: Yeah, probably not in the moment, but when you look at the big picture, that's something when you have that many Toyotas. We all consider ourselves teammates with the JGR bunch and our 23XI Toyotas up there. You want to capitalize on that. You want to get it for somebody. We selfishly want to be the ones in Victory Lane. We're certainly always happy when one of them pick it up.

When we ended up three-, four-wide on the restart, the 5 came out on top, that would have been disappointing if we couldn't get back to him.

Q. Tyler willed his way on the last lap...

BILLY SCOTT: Incredible job of just getting the most out of it, finding the right spot to put his car into side draft, take the air block, once he got clear, all that stuff, masterfully. I think he was a little more determined. Seemingly went south on the green flag run, when we had the fuel issue.

Q. What was the issue with three laps left?

BILLY SCOTT: It was not out of gas. It was a stumble of some sort. I'm assuming it was a fuel pump. He flipped to a secondary one, and it seemed to pick back up.

I think he got into the wall. Trying to figure out what he was going to do, pitting, were we really out of gas. He doesn't know where we're at on fuel level, how close we're calling it in those situations.

We felt confident we had enough gas in there. It's some sort of mechanical problem that we'll dive into this week.

Q. Throughout the day talking to guys, it felt like every time they went back in to get adjustments, they ended up coming back on the next time tight. Did you experience that with Tyler throughout the race? How was it for you as far as cording?

BILLY SCOTT: Fortunate for us, our balance stayed pretty consistent from the sense of we knew what we were fighting. We slowly made progress on it, and we continued in the same direction with some small air pressure stuff throughout the day and ended probably the best we were.

Cording was a huge concern. Started in practice yesterday. We saw many cars with cords on the tire. We were kind of balancing when we stopped on the green all day around that. We didn't want to stay out too long on the frontside and give up track position. We knew if we came too early, had a longer run at the back, the risk was there.

That's what happened to us end of stage one. Fortunately we were able to hold onto third because we had a big gap. We fell back multiple seconds those last couple laps because the tire was pretty bad.

Q. Do you feel if you had a situation on the final run where you didn't have to pit, would you have been able to go a full fuel run on the tires?

BILLY SCOTT: Unfortunately for us, it was a product of getting our balance closer and of the track rubbering in. It did get a little better as the day went. Stage one was our worst tires that came off.

Felt like when we stopped under green in stage three, we broke it directly in half, we're going to get 47 laps out of both sets. Those tires looked as good as any he had all day. If we had to run a little more, we certainly could have. It's a guessing game at that point of how far that would have been.

Q. On the final restart, was there anything you said to Tyler to get him motivated?

BILLY SCOTT: No. Just told him to refocus. Take a deep breath and start over. We're still on the front row, a great place to be. We kind of anticipated what might happen with the 5. Historically gone three-wide on the bottom with a good restart. Knew the 20 was one of the best at getting to the outside to our right rear. Both of those things happened.

Four of the best in the series up there battling. Any one of them could have come out on top. It worked out perfectly. Again, he put himself in the exact right spot to make it happen.

Q. Given the lead you and Denny had both coming to pit road, did you consider four tires?

BILLY SCOTT: No, we did not. We expected the better part of 10 cars or so to do it, especially with a green-white-checkered. It wasn't like we had a full fuel run before that. Having stopped before on green, 40-ish laps on tires wasn't too bad we didn't feel. So that was our plan all along.

THE MODERATOR: Billy, congratulations.

BILLY SCOTT: Thank you.