Austin Dillon has won the last two NASCAR Cup Series races at Richmond Raceway and has a good chance at a three-peat this weekend.
RICHMOND, Va. -- Remember how Austin Dillon won championships in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series and the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series before coming up to the NASCAR Cup Series? You may be reminded this weekend at Richmond Raceway.
Dillon enters Saturday night's Cook Out 400 as the winner of the race the last two years. The outcomes have been the same but how he did it each year was wildly different.
In 2025, Dillon placed fourth in each stage and led 107 of 400 laps, including the final 49, to win by more than two seconds.
The year before, he was set for a similar win until a caution with two laps to go sent the race into overtime, where Logano took the lead. In the final corner, Dillon divebombed him and slammed Hamlin into the wall to take back the win.
Dillon kept the win but lost the automatic postseason berth his win carried at the time. Ultimately, it overshadowed a great performance for the driver of Richard Childress Racing's No. 3 Chevrolet who finished seventh and fifth in the stages and led 35 laps, including the 29 laps before the untimely caution.
These last two years haven't been a fluke or even a product of the Gen 7 car. In the last 13 Cup races at Richmond, dating back to September 2018 with Gen 6 car, he has two wins, three top-five finishes and eight top-10 finishes.
Dillon could add to that this weekend, based on last weekend's run at Iowa Speedway. At a track with similar characteristics as Richmond, he started seventh, finished fifth in the first stage and finished 10th in the race overall with a season-high driver rating of 94.8.
Last year, before Dillon won at Richmond, he also finished 10th at Iowa with a similar run.
If RCR can win at Richmond, it would give their flagship No. 3 a fitting three-peat at Richmond. Dillon would also become the first driver to get a Cup three-peat since Bobby Allison won in September 1982 and swept the races in 1983.
More importantly, RCR would get a huge breakthrough in what has been a nightmare season -- where they've struggled to find performance amid experiencing one of the biggest tragedies in not only the organization's history but also in recent NASCAR history.
Stat: Dillon's two Cup wins at Richmond are his last two top-five finishes in the Cup Series. Before those wins, his last two Cup top-five finishes were a third-place finish at Bristol Dirt in April 2023 and a fourth-place finish at Homestead-Miami Speedway in October 2022.
