Austin Dillon and the American Ethanol Chevrolet Team Battle To Strong, Second-Place Finish at Darlington Raceway
2020 NASCAR Playoffs Run Off To A Solid Start
Finish: 2nd
Start: 12th
Points: 8th
“Man, it would have been nice to get that win and lock ourselves into the next round of the NASCAR Playoffs, but it was a heck of a finish for our No. 3 American Ethanol Chevrolet team. I’m proud of our second-place finish, especially after dropping to the rear of the field at the start of the race and having to recover from that setback. We battled really hard all night for every single spot we could get. We had a really good long run car and towards the end of the race I knew Kevin Harvick was getting tighter each lap. I caught him earlier in the closing run, but he took my low line in Turns 1 and 2, which was where I was running the best, and stopped the momentum that I had going. I gave it everything I had though, and I’m really happy that we had a great run for Junior Johnson during NASCAR Throwback Weekend. He’s one of my heroes, so it was an honor to run a tribute paint scheme for him this weekend. We showed up when it mattered tonight. A lot of people count us out of the Playoffs, but I don’t count myself or this team out of anything. I feel like we’ve brought good race cars all year and have been able to progress throughout these races to make good changes. Sometimes things don’t fall our way, but we continually take chances and that led to the win at Texas. We’re just going to keep doing our thing. Team Chevy has been awesome this year, along with our partners at Dow, AstraZeneca, Bass Pro Shops, RigUp and everyone else involved with RCR and ECR. I can’t thank American Ethanol enough for their support either. We’ve been running with E15 for a while, and it’s great for our engines. This year has been fun. We just have to keep plugging. Richmond Raceway is next week, and we have a good short track car ready for them.” -Austin Dillon
Tyler Reddick Battles Through Mid-Race Contact with Cat Power Chevrolet in First Southern 500 Start
Finish: 23rd
Start: 24th
Points: 19th
“I’ve gotten to run a lot of cool races, but the Southern 500 has always been towards the top of the list for me, so it was really special to be able to make my first start in it tonight. I love NASCAR’s Throwback weekend, and our No. 8 Cat Power Chevrolet honoring Jeff Burton’s No. 8 scheme that he accepted Rookie of the Year honors with looked great out there. We fired off really fast tonight, but our handling was just a touch loose. My team made some good adjustments early in the run to tighten me up, but then the rear security of our Camaro became really unstable, which made it tough to manage the handling through the turns on both sides of the track. During the start of Stage 3, the field got stacked up on the restart and I received some damage to the nose of our car, right above the grille. That affected the handling a lot for the rest of the night and kept the temps up high, too. We kept digging though, made repairs when we could and tried to get every spot possible out there. It just wasn’t our night tonight, but we’ll keep after it. There are still nine more races for us to go out and challenge for a win.” -Tyler Reddick
