Associated Press
JOLIET, Ill. ó Austin Dillon moved closer to the Trucks Series points lead by winning at Chicagoland Speedway on Friday night.
It was the fourth victory of Dillon’s career, second of this season. But the field included Sprint Cup stars Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch, and beating them made it a career highlight.
“It’s huge, it’s the biggest win of my career,” Dillon said. “I’ve wanted to beat those guys and everybody asks ‘How do you feel about racing against Cup drivers?’ Every time they ask me the question, I say ‘I love it’ because that proves we can go out there and run with them.
“It proves we can get to the next level. I’m glad when they come into the series, they are very tough to beat, they are supposed to be, and when you beat them it makes it that much better.”
The win helped Dillon slice nine points off of James Buescher’s lead in the standings. He now trails Buescher, who finished 11th, by three with seven races left in the season.
“We’ve been thinking championship from the beginning of the year. That’s what we set out to do,” Dillon said. “I feel like we’ve had a championship season, just not been able to finish at the end of races. We’ve been the fastest truck pretty much all year and tonight we were able to finish it.”
Harvick dominated by leading a race-high 99 of the 150 laps, but everybody was forced to make one last pit stop under the green flag.
A vibration in his Chevrolet forced Harvick to take four tires, and pushed him further back in the field than he expected when he got back on the track.
“That definitely dictated the four-tire call,” said Harvick, who also got held up racing Kyle Busch for position as they chased down Dillon.
“Look, he’s trying to race me hard and make a mistake and did what he had to do to try to make that happen. That’s just part of it, and that’s exactly what Austin needed to get enough distance and lapped cars between us. You just race as hard as you can and we came up a little short.”
Harvick wound up second as Dillon snapped the streak of four consecutive wins by Kevin Harvick Inc.-owned trucks. Harvick and Ron Hornaday Jr. had combined to win the last four races, and Harvick said last week that KHI would close its program at the end of the season.
But he wasn’t lamenting the loss to Dillon, the grandson of Richard Childress, Harvick’s car owner in the Sprint Cup Series. Childress is also taking over KHI’s Nationwide cars next season.
“As a driver you want to win the race, especially with a truck like that, but nine times out of 10 you don’t win ’em on days like that,” Harvick said. “But in the end, we kept it all in the family.”
Dillon and Busch pitted at about the same time, and both took two tires. But Dillon said he’d been watching Busch pit lately and used what he’d learned to get a jump on him.
“I got to watching … and kind of judged off of where I needed to be,” Dillon said. “He was way wide when he entered pit road and I kind of cut that distance off by getting on pit road earlier.”
KHI driver Nelson Piquet Jr. was third, and said he’s actively searching for a new job now that KHI is closing.
“I’m still searching for a truck team,” he said. “It’s not easy to find a truck team at the level of KHI. If I knew which one it was, I would have picked it a long time ago. So we’re trying to see what our options are.”
Parker Kligerman was fourth, followed by Kyle Busch, Johnny Sauter and Matt Crafton.
The top 10 was rounded out by Miguel Paludo, Cole Whitt and Ron Hornaday Jr.