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NASCAR Camping World Trucks Series
HEMBREE: From One Dillon To Another
Young Austin Dillon is learning under his father at Richard Childress Racing...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted June 04, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Austin Dillon is a rookie in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Mike Dillon is the typical Little League father. Except his son, Austin, is playing the game at 190 miles per hour.

It’s an unusual situation for a dad. Not to mention the kid.

Austin Dillon is under all sorts of microscopes. He drives the black No. 3 Camping World Truck series entry. No one has to remind him which driver is best remembered for driving the 3. He drives for his grandfather, legendary Richard Childress. And the guy managing the 20-year-old’s fledgling career is his father, Mike, Richard Childress Racing’s vice president of competition.

“It’s very hard for me,” Mike Dillon, a former driver himself, said. “I have to stay off the radio. I just get caught up in it. I expect too much from him. I guess it’s a lot like a Little League parent. I’ve got it in me, and I can’t help it.”

With experience as a driver, primarily in the Nationwide Series, Mike Dillon would seem to be a logical candidate to spot for his son. No way, Dad said.

“It wouldn’t work,” he said. “He’s hard-headed like me. I go up in the stands with a scanner and just listen. It would mess him up too much. When Dad fires off something, it makes him mad. Right or wrong, it doesn’t matter.”
Austin Dillon wins the pole at NASCAR Camping World Truck Series FORD 200 at Homestead-Miami Speedway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Thursday was one of the “right” moments. Austin scored the first pole of his career at Texas Motor Speedway and will start first in Friday night’s race.

This is Dillon’s first full season in the Truck Series. It began at Daytona with a potentially disheartening – and certainly dangerous – moment. On the first lap of the Truck opener, Dillon was caught three-wide in a mess of aggressive traffic at the front of the field, lost control of his truck and became the central point of an accident that eventually involved nine trucks.

For a young rookie who had waited through a long offseason to make a spectacular superspeedway debut driving for his grandfather and wrapped up by 3s, it was a fist-to-the-gut moment.


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Mike Hembree

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