Austin Hill 'on the cusp' after runner-up day, leaves Darlington with Xfinity points lead
DARLINGTON, S.C. — Austin Hill led just six laps in Saturday’s NASCAR Xfinity Series matinee, his total a small sum compared to the 119 of 147 headed by race winner Justin Allgaier. Running and finishing on his heels as the race’s runner-up was a tough pill, especially at challenging Darlington Raceway and its history-steeped contours.
“You always want to win at Darlington,” Hill said after exiting his No. 21 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet. “Just something about this place. It’s such a badass race track that we go to.”
Hill finished second in Saturday’s Crown Royal Purple Bag Project 200, on a day where most of the field was fighting for next-best status to Allgaier’s No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet. Hill’s challenge burned among the brightest, making him 5-for-5 in the top-10 column in his Xfinity career at Darlington and helping to get him back on the top-five track that characterized his hot start to the 2024 season.
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“Awesome job all day. The 7 was just a touch better,” Hill’s radio communications chirped on the post-race cool-down lap, with spotter Derek Kneeland adding: “We’re on the cusp of winning a s—load here.”
Hill agreed, saying that his team shouldn’t be pigeonholed as superspeedway specialists. That strength, he said, is starting to spread.
“I think that we have speed, no matter where we go. We’re not just the superspeedway guys that everyone wants to sit there and talk about all the time, but we can win at all these other race tracks. We can run inside the top five at every different race track we go to, so we’re piecing it together,” Hill said, reiterating his spotter’s hunch. “… We’ve just got to keep grinding, I’ve got to do a better job, and we’ve just got to make the right decisions when I come in and we do pit stops and adjustments. So if we just keep building what we’re building, we can win a lot more. It’s just, it might take a little bit more time, but I’m having fun this year. We’re running up front each and every week so we can get it done no matter where we go.”
Allgaier swept both stages, with Hill slotting in second place at each green-checkered flag that segmented up Saturday’s 200-miler. Hill brushed the outside retaining wall during the middle portions of Stage 2, but the slight contact left his No. 21 Chevy no worse off.
Hill faded slightly during the final stage, but jumped back up into podium contention after pit-stop adjustments from crew chief Andy Street to remedy a tight-handling condition. He dutifully leapt from the second row back up to second place on the final restart.
“Our boy is absolutely wheeling it today,” Kneeland told Street over the radio during a final-stage yellow.
Saturday’s effort resembled the type of result that Hill had made routine when the season started. The 30-year-old Georgia native opened the year with back-to-back victories (Daytona, Atlanta) and made it five in a row for top-five finishes as the calendar hit springtime. The five races that followed registered nary a top five, though he led laps in double-digit quantities the last three weeks.
Saturday put Hill back on that high ground. It also moved him up two spots into the lead in the Xfinity Series standings, with a narrow three-point edge over defending series champion Cole Custer — Saturday’s pole-starter and third-place finisher.
“It’s cool. It’s always nice to have the points lead and it’s nice to hopefully here at the end get those extra 15 bonus points,” Hill said, acknowledging the points prize reserved for the regular-season champ. “But nothing else matters except for those last seven races for when the playoffs start. We’re just trying to build a notebook, so when the playoffs do start, we can come out on all cylinders.”
