When the Southern sun beat down on Darlington Raceway, Hendrick Motorsports’ playoff quartet took to the ‘Lady in Black’ with championship hopes burning bright. Yet, reality hit hard. No HMS driver, including Chase Elliott, William Byron, Kyle Larson, and Alex Bowman, finished in the top 16, marking the team’s worst collective outing at Darlington in the modern era, with an average finish of 22.0, the fourth worst in a four-car shootout. “We’ve definitely got some work to do. We’ll go to Gateway and try to be better there,” Byron lamented. But the performance was marred by a blunder that underscored deeper issues.

Underneath the surface of that dismal result lay a punishing snapshot of chaos on pit road: Alex Bowman’s green-flag stop devolved into a nearly 40-second debacle. A detached

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