Report: William Byron to drive the No. 5 Chevy for Hendrick in 2018

The future is apparently now for Hendrick Motorsports, as the team is expected to promote 19-year-old William Byron to the NASCAR Cup Series next season.

Seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson is going to be the old man in the Hendrick Motorsports team by a wide margin in 2018. He’s already getting 24-year-old Alex Bowman as a teammate, and if reports are correct, the even younger William Byron will be joining him as well.

ESPN’s Bob Pockrass is among multiple media outlets reporting that Byron will be named the driver of the No. 5 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports beginning in the 2018 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season. That seat opened up when Hendrick announced that it was releasing its current occupant, Kasey Kahne, at the end of the current campaign.

The move ranks as a mild surprise because most NASCAR observers believed Hendrick wanted Byron to have another year of NASCAR XFINITY Series seasoning before making the move to Cup Series. He’s never made a Cup Series start to date and will be seeing several tracks next year for the first time.

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Then again, he might not need any more time to prove himself given the way he’s performed for JR Motorsports this season. Byron currently sits in second place in the XFINITY points race behind leader Elliott Sadler, but he’s impressed by racking up three wins — as many as all other XFINITY Series regulars combined.

Of course, Byron couldn’t have a better champion to lean on than Johnson, and he’ll also have Chase Elliott, now amusingly a veteran presence on the Hendrick team at just 21, to ask about the transition from one series to the next. The youth movement is fully underway at the top level of NASCAR, and Byron’s promotion is just the latest sign that it’s probably just going to continue.