Austin Dillon wins NASCAR Richmond again; no asterisks

When Austin Dillon walked into the media center last year after winning the summer NASCAR Cup race at Richmond, he was immediately engulfed by this figurative dark cloud, where everyone in the room knew to a degree that the results wouldn’t stand.

Ultimately, they stood but only to a point, as NASCAR stripped him of the guaranteed playoff berth for winning.  

A year later, Austin Dillon again victoriously walked into that room with no asterisks but also a bit of a swagger. He dominated the second half of this race again, was not denied by a late race caution, and closed the deal without controversy.

“If you want to call it swagger, I'm all about it,” Dillon said. “I feel like growing up in the Truck Series and Xfinity Series, I felt like I had maximum swag, swagger, winning and doing different things.

“You get to Cup level (and) it just humbles you. It's a whole other department of winning. Now I'm more thankful than anything. It's not like, Kiss my butt, I won. It's more like, Man, that was awesome. To be able to get a win at the highest level of motorsport, and do it for my family, RCR, Welcome, the pit crew, all those guys. I'm the guy that got to wheel it tonight. Thank you, Jesus.”

Dillon doesn’t carry the same chip on his shoulder that his grandfather and team owner Richard Childress does. The chip, which he feels NASCAR firmly planted last year and then repeatedly hammered deeper over the past 12 months, has driven him.

It cost his company millions, plural, of dollars and just struck him as intellectually dishonest to a point. After all, from Childress’ standpoint, this is NASCAR where contact is encouraged.

Even that contact.

“I’ve seen them same guys do the same thing to get wins. I just try to put that behind me.”
“Last year, it is what it is. That's history right now.”

He said it was history, twice after the race, but his grandson said he hasn’t moved on yet.

“One thing that I think really hurt him last year this Richmond race, going over this process, it stung to him because he felt like NASCAR kind of let him down in a way,” Dillon said. “They had to make a call. I got over it. He doesn't get over those type of things.

“Hopefully this lets him sleep at night again to that point because this sport is special. It's given our family a living and a lot of other families a living.”

With that said, last year did hurt him too, but not enough to make him angry returning to the scene of the … well, scene, last year.

“I'm too tired to be angry,” Dillon said. “Man, some things you don't understand at the time but they come back around. God has a way of putting the timing together.”

Dillon said he was the calmest he had ever been behind the wheel leading that race on Saturday.

“If you would have told me we would come back a year later and be sitting in Victory Lane after all we went through … like I cried in our appeal process because that win meant a lot to me to be able to race with Denny and Joey. … Then to come back this year, everyone is telling you, ‘Go get it done’ and you can get the redemption here.”

More than anything else, Dillon just viewed this as finishing the story because this race played out exactly like the one last August.

“Dude, I had a three-second lead last year before the caution came out,” Dillon said.  “Tonight it kind of played out the same way it did last year.”

They took the lead, held off drivers on slightly fresher tires, and didn’t get bit by a caution. This is the win everyone, at least those conversing in good faith, will say he all but earned last year.

Even his current crew chief, Richard Boswell, who was working with Chase Briscoe at Stewart-Haas Racing last year.

“I wanted to see Austin win it like he should have won it last year, right,” Boswell said. “Without a caution there, he wins by four or five seconds. I don't think we quite won by that much tonight.”

They will celebrate it all the same, which is not something they were able to enjoy last year. Both Childress and Dillon said there was a celebration last year, even with all the noise, but they will make all their noise this year.

“Well, the guys already asked if we were going to the house to party,” Dillon said. “I'll do whatever. Like I said, I'm wore out. When we left, Ace (son) was like, ‘Dad, we haven't won in a long time’ and I was like ‘it was just last year dude’ but he says he wants everyone to come over to the house.

“I guess everyone is coming over.”

The Die is Cast

In addition to the redemption arc, the victory also has all the playoff consequences it would have had last year, but this time these are going to stick too.

Dillon, who entered this race 28th in the championship standings, moved the playoff cutline up. In other words, Chris Buescher, 11th in the standings, is now 60 points behind Alex Bowman for the final provisional playoff spot.

And oh by the way, the regular season finale next weeks is Daytona where literally anyone could win their way into the playoffs, and that could eliminate Bowman too.

For that matter, Bowman is only 29 points behind Tyler Reddick too so there will be a mini points battle between them to avoid being the driver eliminated if there is another upset victor.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do aside from go to try to win the race,” Bowman said. “Yeah, we’ll do the best we can at that and know that we’re going to get zero favors. But that’s life.”

To better illustrate what happened to Buescher on Saturday, his RFK Racing No. 17 team entered the race 34 points above the cutline and now he’s 60 below after finishing 30th.

“Just a bad day,” he said. “We weren’t very good. Just not competitive enough and struggled through a lot of it. I don’t even know where we finished at this point. But it doesn’t really matter.

“We are in a must win spot heading into Daytona, which is a terrible spot for plate racing, because I know we’ll be fast but so many wild things could happen. We’ve won there before so we’ll regroup from this one and get ready for that one.”

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