Austin Dillon, RCR eager for new life after crew-chief change: 'It's a big morale boost for our team'
MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Richard Childress Racing hopes the third time is the charm for its storied No. 3 Chevrolet.
The organization announced a crew-chief change Tuesday for the No. 3 car piloted by Austin Dillon, pairing the 2018 Daytona 500 champion with Justin Alexander for the third time in the past eight seasons. Dillon, a four-time winner in the NASCAR Cup Series, has scored each of those victories with Alexander atop the pit box.
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Most recently serving as RCR’s competition director, Alexander takes over for Keith Rodden, who’d headed the team since the start of the 2023 season. Rodden now transitions to “a larger role across the organization to help maximize the capabilities of RCR‘s Chevys and provide leadership, coordination and support,” the team said.
“Yeah, it’s hard to make a change midseason,” Dillon said Saturday before practice. “But having Justin be a part of RCR for as long as has been in the role that he was in, it kind of helped us just do a swap. Justin has done a good job. Obviously, my four Cup race wins have come with Justin and bringing back, too, his engineer Joel Keller, who (he) has a really good relationship with, I think it bodes well for our team. Everybody’s excited to get to work.”
The swap comes on the heels of a 24th-place finish at Richmond Raceway, where frustration became evident on the team’s radio over strategy calls. In seven races, Dillon has just one top-20 finish — a 16th-place effort at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in March. Last season also marked a career-high in DNFs for Dillon after failing to finish 10 times and scoring just seven top-10 results in 2023, a stark contrast from the 11 top 10s he scored in the debut year of the Next Gen car in 2022.
For RCR, that meant there was no better time to make a change than now.
“We had my best year in the series with the Next Gen cars the first year, and then we just kind of lost that momentum, and we couldn’t ever get it back going,” Dillon said. “I think it’s a big morale boost for our team, like I said, and to get Justin back on board with traveling and going to the race track, you know, that was the biggest thing.
“Truthfully, Justin and I wouldn’t have ever changed. It was just one of the things that the schedule’s brutal. He’s got two young kids, and he wanted something different. So when we had to make the change, it wasn’t ideal for both of us, but it was something Justin needed to do, and we were able to fortunately get him back talked into coming back to the track. And I’m really thankful that him and his family and his wife are allowing him to come back to race with us because we need it, and our team’s excited about it.”
Chemistry is key in the relationship between a crew chief and a driver, particularly in an era where competition is closer than ever. Dillon and Alexander’s prior success together bodes well for what could come next for the No. 3 group.
“I think he communicates really well with me; giving me information during the race is something I need,” Dillon said. “From his standpoint, he just tells me the right things. And I think communication is half the battle once the race starts. If you can communicate better than the others are about strategy or what the car needs, you just have better races. This has been good for us in the past. I think Keith did a really good job at certain things, and Justin does a really good job in certain things. But obviously, our communication that Justin and I have been able to have over the years has been able to get us to this point. Glad to have him back.”
A strong No. 3 team can bolster RCR’s No. 8 team with driver Kyle Busch and crew chief Randall Burnett. Busch’s results have been more mixed than his teammate’s, but Busch — a two-time Cup champion — has finished 20th or worse in four of the last five races.
“I think anything for RCR is the strength in having both teams running up front,” Busch said. “It seems like there’s a comfort factor there with Austin and Justin. And Justin, I think he’s tried to come off the road a couple times for family and whatnot, but he kind of keeps getting pulled back out of the bullpen and put in play.
“I respect the hell out of Keith and Justin and Randall and all those guys — (RCR’s executive vice president Andy) Petree too. It’s not due to lack of intellect. We certainly have that. There’s a lot going on at the shop and things like that where it seems like there’s some pretty good minds being put to use on the stuff that we do. It just hasn’t correlated to the race track yet.”
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In a sense, that also encapsulates how RCR has run on short tracks recently. As the duo prepares for Sunday’s Cook Out 400 (3 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), Busch and Dillon enter the 0.526-mile oval with a combined two top 10s in eight Next Gen starts at Martinsville. Busch will roll off 11th on the starting grid for Sunday’s race, while Dillon will start 28th.
“I feel like I know how to get around Martinsville,” Busch said. “I’ve won here before. I feel like my good stretch of races here certainly came from the 2013-14 timeframe to about ’18-19. So we had some good runs. I think we won two or three races here in that time period. So yeah, the short-track stuff, though, has been very miss. We have had like two hits, I think. It’d be nice to get more on the hit side and to where we have good cars and that we’re able to go out there and contend and compete.
“I think a lot of it is just the reliance on the simulation and what we’re being told in that and making decisions based off of that, what makes you faster or better in the sim. And that is not transferring to the race track, so we’ve got to go about it a different way.”
