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<\/p>\nWhen 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\u2019t stand.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, they stood but only to a point, as NASCAR stripped him of the guaranteed playoff berth for winning. \u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to call it swagger, I’m all about it,\u201d Dillon said. \u201cI feel like growing up in the Truck Series and Xfinity Series, I felt like I had maximum swag, swagger, winning and doing different things.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dillon doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
It cost his company millions, plural, of dollars and just struck him as intellectually dishonest to a point. After all, from Childress\u2019 standpoint, this is NASCAR where contact is encouraged.<\/p>\n
Even that contact.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve seen them same guys do the same thing to get wins. I just try to put that behind me.\u201d
\u201cLast year, it is what it is. That’s history right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said it was history, twice after the race, but his grandson said he hasn\u2019t moved on yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne 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,\u201d Dillon said. \u201cThey had to make a call. I got over it. He doesn’t get over those type of things.<\/p>\n
\u201cHopefully 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
With that said, last year did hurt him too, but not enough to make him angry returning to the scene of the \u2026 well, scene, last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m too tired to be angry,\u201d Dillon said. \u201cMan, some things you don’t understand at the time but they come back around. God has a way of putting the timing together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dillon said he was the calmest he had ever been behind the wheel leading that race on Saturday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you would have told me we would come back a year later and be sitting in Victory Lane after all we went through \u2026 like I cried in our appeal process because that win meant a lot to me to be able to race with Denny and Joey. \u2026 Then to come back this year, everyone is telling you, \u2018Go get it done\u2019 and you can get the redemption here.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than anything else, Dillon just viewed this as finishing the story because this race played out exactly like the one last August.<\/p>\n
\u201cDude, I had a three-second lead last year before the caution came out,\u201d Dillon said. \u00a0\u201cTonight it kind of played out the same way it did last year.\u201d<\/p>\n
They took the lead, held off drivers on slightly fresher tires, and didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Even his current crew chief, Richard Boswell, who was working with Chase Briscoe at Stewart-Haas Racing last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to see Austin win it like he should have won it last year, right,\u201d Boswell said. \u201cWithout a caution there, he wins by four or five seconds. I don’t think we quite won by that much tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, the guys already asked if we were going to the house to party,\u201d Dillon said. \u201cI’ll do whatever. Like I said, I’m wore out. When we left, Ace (son) was like, \u2018Dad, we haven’t won in a long time\u2019 and I was like \u2018it was just last year dude\u2019 but he says he wants everyone to come over to the house.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess everyone is coming over.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Die is Cast![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/GettyImages-2230516168.jpg.webp.webp\")
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what we\u2019re going to do aside from go to try to win the race,\u201d Bowman said. \u201cYeah, we\u2019ll do the best we can at that and know that we\u2019re going to get zero favors. But that\u2019s life.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 60 below after finishing 30th.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust a bad day,\u201d he said. \u201cWe weren\u2019t very good. Just not competitive enough and struggled through a lot of it. I don\u2019t even know where we finished at this point. But it doesn\u2019t really matter.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are in a must win spot heading into Daytona, which is a terrible spot for plate racing, because I know we\u2019ll be fast but so many wild things could happen. We\u2019ve won there before so we\u2019ll regroup from this one and get ready for that one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Results13Austin Dillon400—248Alex Bowman4002.471312Ryan Blaney4008.246422Joey Logano4008.49152Austin Cindric4009.27065Kyle Larson40010.186799Daniel Suarez40011.385821Josh Berry40014.06396Brad Keselowski40015.1241011Denny Hamlin40015.4291138* Zane Smith40015.7801224William Byron40021.5881319Chase Briscoe40023.9841488Shane Van Gisbergen #3990.0001577Carson Hocevar3990.000168Kyle Busch3990.0001771Michael McDowell3991 lap1854Ty Gibbs3991 lap191Ross Chastain3991 lap2010Ty Dillon3991 lap2120Christopher Bell3991 lap2216AJ Allmendinger3991 lap2347Ricky Stenhouse Jr.3991 lap2441Cole Custer3991 lap2534* Todd Gilliland3991 lap2643Erik Jones3981 lap274* Noah Gragson3981 lap2823* Bubba Wallace3982 laps2967* Corey Heim(i)3982 laps3017Chris Buescher3982 laps3135* Riley Herbst #3982 laps3251Cody Ware3973 laps3333* Jesse Love(i)3964 laps3445* Tyler Reddick3963 laps3560Ryan Preece3964 laps3642John Hunter Nemechek38910 laps377Justin Haley198OUT389Chase Elliott197OUT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Austin Dillon walked into the media center last year after winning the summer NASCAR Cup race at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-75832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nascar","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}