Folks, let me tell you about a man and his favorite kind of racetrack.
Austin Hill drives the No. 21 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet, and when the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series lines up at a drafting track, he is the closest thing this series has to a sure thing. Eleven drafting-track wins, all-time series record. Eighteen drafting-track stage wins, all-time series record. The most laps led on drafting tracks, all-time, and 925 of those, sixty-five percent of every lap he has ever led, have come while running in a pack. He does this on 17 percent of his starts. That is not a hot streak. That is a specialty.
And Saturday night, the O'Reilly Series brings that specialty home. The Focused Health 250 runs at EchoPark Speedway, the 1.54-mile drafting track southwest of Atlanta, at 7 p.m. ET on the CW: 163 laps, 251 miles, stages at 45 and 90 and the checkered at 163. Hill grew up in Georgia. And he arrives with five career Atlanta wins, which ties him with a fellow named Kevin Harvick for the most anybody has ever won at this track in this series. Win a sixth, in his home state, and the record is his alone. That is the headline. That is the whole ballgame. Or it would be, if Atlanta ever cooperated.
Here's the thing about a drafting track: it does not care about your resume. The last two Atlanta races in this series were both won by first-time winners, Nick Sanchez a year ago and Sheldon Creed this past February, out of the Haas Factory Team. The pass for the win comes late, it comes in the pack, and the driver who deserves it and the driver who gets it are not always the same guy. Hill knows this better than anyone. He is the favorite and he would be the first to tell you the favorite gets swallowed here all the time.
Now, the championship. On the scoreboard it looks over. Justin Allgaier, the No. 7 JR Motorsports Chevrolet, leads this series by 195 points. That is not a lead. That is a zip code. It is bigger than the gap between second place and 12th. He clinched his playoff spot back at Pocono, he has five wins to match the best single season of his career, and his 33 career victories are sixth on the all-time list, five shy of Carl Edwards. Big-time season.
But watch the trend line, because it is bending. Allgaier averaged a 6.0 finish over the first 10 races of the year. Over the last 10, that number is 13.2. Two of his last three finishes were outside the top 25. The trophy is safe, the seeding is locked, but the guy who was untouchable in the spring has looked ordinary for a month. Something to file away for the playoffs.
The best story in the top six belongs to the one driver up there without a win. Jesse Love, the No. 2 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet, is second in the standings on three runner-up finishes and a whole lot of consistency. He is the only driver in the field with a top 10 at every drafting track this year. He was fifth here in February. And he just announced he is leaving, moving up to the Cup Series next season to drive the famous No. 21 Ford for Wood Brothers Racing, the longest-running active team in NASCAR. A young man on his way up, chasing a first win in the series he is about to leave, at a track that suits him. Keep an eye on the No. 2.
Where the real heat is, though, is down at the bottom of the playoff grid. Four races left to set the 12-driver field, and it is a knife fight. Brent Crews holds the final transfer spot, 12th, by 44 points over his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate William Sawalich, which means one team owns both sides of the cut line. Rajah Caruth is 48 points behind Crews. Positions nine through 12 are covered by 29 points. A drafting track is the last place a bubble driver wants to be playing defense, because one block that doesn't stick and your whole season is a highlight on somebody else's win.
And through all of it, JR Motorsports just keeps stacking history. Twelve wins through 20 races, the most the team has ever had this deep into a season, one shy of the all-time record. A top 10 in 77 straight races, second-longest streak the series has ever seen. Five different winners. This weekend they even find room in the No. 9 for Jake Finch, son of James Finch, making his first start for the team and the second of his whole career. When you are running that far ahead of the pack, you can afford to hand a kid the keys.
One more thing, because the schedule made it interesting: this is half a doubleheader. Saturday afternoon the Craftsman Truck Series runs its own road-course finale up at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut, then everybody turns their attention south to Atlanta for the night race. Two very different racetracks, one very full Saturday.
Kennametal Pole Qualifying is 11 a.m. ET. Green flag around 7. Austin Hill has spent a career turning this kind of track into a personal record book. Saturday night he gets to write in it at home. Don't touch that dial.