Austin Dillon

Austin Dillon was born on April 27, 1990, in the USA and grew up in a family deeply connected to motorsports: his grandfather Richard Childress is the team owner of Richard Childress Racing, his father Mike Dillon works as the team’s General Manager, and his younger brother Ty Dillon also races in the NASCAR Cup Series. Dillon gained his first racing experience between 2005 and 2007 in the Bandolero and Legends classes before learning the fundamentals of dirt-track racing from Dirt-Late-Model driver Dale McDowell.

In 2008, Dillon became Rookie of the Year in the NASCAR Camping World East Series, initially for Andy Santerre Motorsports, later under the banner of Richard Childress Racing in the Chevrolet number 3; a victory at Greenville-Pickens Speedway was among his achievements. The move to the Camping World Truck Series followed, where in 2010 with support from Bass Pro Shops he impressed as Rookie of the Year, earned his first pole at Texas Motor Speedway, and celebrated his first race win at the Lucas Oil 200 at Iowa Speedway. In 2011 he capped this development with the Truck Series title, including wins at Nashville Superspeedway and Chicagoland Speedway.

The next big step came in 2013 when Dillon won the NASCAR Nationwide Series, today Xfinity Series, and did so without a single race win, but purely through impressive consistency with 13 top-5 and 22 top-10 finishes. In 2014 he brought the number 3 back to the Cup Series as a full-time number for the first time since Dale Earnhardt’s death in 2001 and immediately secured the pole for the Daytona 500. He celebrated his first Cup win in 2017 at the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte thanks to clever fuel strategy, before in 2018 winning the Daytona 500, twenty years after Earnhardt’s triumph, achieving the greatest success of his career so far.

Going into the 2026 season, Dillon continues as the full-time driver for Richard Childress Racing, again in the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 with the traditional number 3. After years in the middle of the Cup Series field, his goal remains clear: to build on the successes of 2017 and 2018 and bring his grandfather’s team regular podium finishes and victories again.