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8 hours ago
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Austin Dillon left no doubt this time that he will make the Cup Series playoffs with his second consecutive victory at Richmond Raceway.
A year after his championship eligibility was revoked for wrecking two drivers on the final lap, Dillon earned a playoff berth Saturday night with a clean run to the checkered flag on the 0.75-mile oval.
The Richard Childress Racing driver outdueled Ryan Blaney over the final 100 laps, seizing control with a shrewd strategy call to pit his No. 3 Chevrolet four laps earlier than the Team Penske driver’s No. 12 Ford.
Dillon, who led 107 of 400 laps, won by 2.471 seconds over Alex Bowman. Blaney faded to third, followed by Joey Logano and Austin Cindric.
With his sixth career victory, Dillon became the 14th race winner to lock into the 16-driver field for the Cup playoffs, which are contested over the final 10 races of the season.
The regular season will conclude next Saturday night at Daytona International Speedway, where the final two playoff drivers will be confirmed.
After a first stage that ran 70 laps under green, the yellow flag flew three times during the 160-lap second stage. There was an 11-car wreck on Lap 198 that started with contact between Kyle Busch and Ross Chastain. The pileup also collected Chase Briscoe, Brad Keselowski, points leader William Byron, Denny Hamlin and Chase Elliott, whose No. 9 Chevrolet suffered its first DNF of the season.
Elliott seemed to have skirted the crash by staying to the bottom, but he was tagged in the right rear by Busch and turned into the outside wall after making contact with Byron, his Hendrick Motorsports teammate.
“I have no idea what happened,” Elliott said. “Obviously, I saw them crashing, and we were all just stacking up trying to get stopped and then after the wreck was over, I thought we were done wrecking. I was just trying to squeak by, and I guess Kyle just didn’t know I was to his left, and we were, so I hate that. We had a good start to the night, and it just slowly unraveled until it finally fell apart. So hopefully we get on a better stretch starting next week.”
With a softer right-side tire that had increased wear, the race quickly turned into a strategy battle in Stage 1.
After starting on pole position, Preece elected to ride out the first stage in the hunt for stage points, and five more drivers tried to stretch their first set of tires for the 70-lap opening stint.
Preece led the first 58 laps but faded all the way to 15th in the last 12 laps of the stage. Elliott finished 13th in Stage 1 with the highest-running car among those who had yet to pit.
Hamlin pitted at the stage’s halfway point on Lap 35 and needed only 20 laps to reach the front but scraped the wall while chasing down Preece (who then lost the lead to Tyler Reddick).
It got worse during the stage break for Hamlin, whose slow pit stop was compounded by a speeding penalty. He restarted 36th.
Elliott fell to 34th after being penalized for an improper entry on his first pit stop.
About an hour before the race, Richmond Raceway announced its first sellout in more than 17 years. In its mid-2000s heyday, the track had a maximum capacity of 112,000 seats that were sold out twice annually. In the past 10 years, the grandstands have been reduced to under 50,000 seats, and Richmond was dropped to one scheduled Cup race this season for the first time since 1958.
Stage 1 winner: Reddick
Stage 2 winner: Wallace
Next: Saturday, Aug. 23, 7:30 p.m. ET at Daytona International Speedway on NBC
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