Austin Dillon's Lack of 2024 Speed Likely More Predictive than His Iowa Success
5 months agoAustin Dillon has had a marginal uptick in performance since his stalwart crew chief, Justin Alexander, returned, but he's still having one of his worst seasons and is the fifth-slowest driver in the NASCAR Cup Series this year with a speed percentile of 27.56. This weekend at Iowa, he qualified dead last for Sunday night's Iowa Corn 350 race. Dillon has had a lot of success at Iowa in the past, with a win from pole and 314 laps led in the Craftsman Truck Series and a pole and 376 laps led in the Xfinity Series, but those races were over a decade ago with an entirely different track surface, so they probably won't be very predictive of tonight's event. Although Alexander got Dillon a couple of top 10s recently, his speed still hasn't increased much except for Gateway, and that was mostly due to strategy. Dillon is unlikely to finish well unless Alexander delivers another strategic miracle, although his Place Differential upside makes Austin one of the chalk DFS plays for Sunday night.
Source: Racing Reference
Source: Racing Reference