A hometown win for driver and sponsor is always special, and though it might have become regular it still isn’t old for Austin Hill. He won the Bennett Transportation and Logistics 250 at Atlanta Motor Speedway sporting the livery of the race’s sponsor to make the now-familiar trip to victory lane.
Since Atlanta Motor Speedway was repaved in 2022 to become a superspeedway, Austin Hill has now won five of seven races in the Xfinity Series at the track. This latest win might have been his most dominant showing, as Hill lead 146 of 163 laps in Saturday night’s event.
Hill had to face down the field in a late restart after a caution for debris. The biggest challenger proved to be Aric Almirola, who took the lead from Hill briefly before the driver of the No. 21 took it back for good, racing back to the line on the last lap as the field wrecked behind him.
“Well, I will say, I normally don’t get normally or sick to my stomach or anything, but the last 20 laps I was sick to my stomach. I was trying to stay focused and trying to stay locked-in,” he explained.
The result was requiem for last week at Daytona where Hill was running up front with a chance to win before being taken out with mechanical problems.
“The only thing that would make it any sweeter would be to have Daytona back, I think we had a real chance of winning that one as well,” Hill said. “But the Bennett Chevrolet was so fast, just as fast as last week. There were some areas that I think we can work on when we come back, but that’s the great thing about this sport, you’re always improving, you’re always getting better.”
Hill’s teammate Jesse Love won at Daytona, meaning Richard Childress Racing has swept the opening races of the season and locked both cars into the Playoffs at the earliest opportunity. Hill highlighted the strength of the team.
“My new crewchief, Chad Heney, that’s his first career win as an Xfinity crewchief; so cool to get that for him this early in the year. This is just such a special group, everyone on this 21 team, I have so much fun here at RCR,” he said. “Total team effort, everyone here has worked really hard in the offseason, and I really hope that we go show it on all the other racetracks, not just superspeedways.
“We were kind of hitting our stride last season and I feel really good about this season,” he concluded with worrying words for the rest of the field.
Justin Allgaier finished second after getting by Aric Almirola at the end. The drivers made contact in the process of sidedrafting off each other and words were exchanged, but Allgaier explained that it was all positive between two drivers with respect for each other.
“Just really hard at the end there and the way that the runs were generating,” Allgaier explained. “Just such a weird race: single-file for the majority of it there and once it started getting side-by-side it was hard to know what we needed to do.”
For Almirola’s part, he felt he should’ve finished second but didn’t see anything too foul in how Allgaier raced him back to the line.
“It was fun. It was exciting. I thought we were going to steal it away from them,” he said of his chance to beat Hill by leading briefly in the closing laps.
Almirola explained that once he got out in front he didn’t have the help from behind to have any chance of staying in front of Hill.
“He got back out front and I just tried really hard to slow down to the 7 but he didn’t have any energy behind him, and I just over-slowed my race car and let the 7 [of Allgaier] beat me to the line, which is probably dumb, but it was the right thing that I needed to do to try and generate one last run to try and beat the 21 [of Hill]. I guess at that point, I should have just taken second.”
Sammy Smith and Nick Sanchez rounded out the top five. Jeb Burton, Daniel Dye, Leland Honeyman, William Sawalich, and Harrison Burton all earned top-ten finishes.
The race featured nine cautions, including a five-car incident that set up a restart with 15 laps to go. But one of the biggest incidents of the race did not draw the yellow flag at all.
On the last lap, Sheldon Creed and Parker Retzlaff got together, sending Retzlaff spinning and collecting Ryan Seig and Christian Eckes. Despite the wreckage, the caution flag was not thrown as NASCAR deemed that the field was safely ahead of the wreck and not bearing down on safety vehicles.
The Xfinity Series returns at the Circuit of The Americas on Saturday, March 1st.
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