That is as cruel as motorsport gets. According to Motorsport.com, Austin Hill was just a few corners away from a stunning potential victory before his No. 33 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet abruptly lost power on the white flag lap at Talladega.
Hill is already known as a force on drafting tracks in the secondary level of NASCAR, with four wins at Daytona, two at Talladega, and five at the reconfigured Atlanta. Making his presence felt in the Cup Series this weekend, he qualified on the outside of the front row, led six laps, and put himself right in the thick of the fight at the finish.
Everything was building toward a career-best day. On the final restart, he was pushing Kyle Larson ahead of the pack before making a daring three-wide pass. That left him second, hunting down Ricky Stenhouse Jr. coming out of Turn 4 with the win in sight.
Then came the disaster. As the team urged him over the radio to hold it wide open and make his move, the machine simply died. Hill yanked the car down onto the apron, crawling across the line at 120mph and a rapidly decreasing pace to finish 14th as the last driver on the lead lap.
"We were close," Hill said after the race, citing the speed of his United Rentals Chevrolet and the hard work put in by the crew all day. "Just lost power coming to the checkered."
Radio transmissions captured the frustration immediately as the power vanished completely. While the spotter initially speculated they might be out of fuel, Hill's own frantic words over the team radio pointed elsewhere: "Yep, f*** those switches. I'm never doing that again."
While it remains unclear exactly which switch caused the drama, potentially the fuel reserve switch, the engine eventually re-fired down the backstretch on the cool-down lap, allowing him to limp back to the pits safely. Hill is scheduled to step up to compete full-time in the NASCAR Cup Series next year for the first time in his career, taking over the renumbered RCR seat following the tragic passing of Kyle Busch earlier this year.
