TRUCKS: Dillon Outraces Truck Veterans

Camping World Trucks

TRUCKS: Dillon Outraces Truck Veterans

Series champ Austin Dillon leads top-10 driver list for Camping World Truck Series…

Mike Hembree | Posted December 24, 2011 Charlotte, NC

Camping World Truck Series champion Austin Dillon (Left) is presented his championship ring by NASCAR president Mike Helton (Right) at the series' annual awards banquet. (Photo: Getty Images)

A series that has celebrated more seasoned drivers during much of its existence crowned a young gun as champion this season as Austin Dillon raced to the Camping World Truck Series championship.

Dillon, 21 and the grandson of veteran team owner Richard Childress, edged Johnny Sauter by six points to bring the Truck trophy home to Welcome, N.C. He tops SPEED.com’s list of the top 10 Camping World Truck Series drivers of 2011:

1. Austin Dillon – Sure, he had great equipment. Sure, he had a great team. Sure, his grandfather carries a lot of weight in the NASCAR garage. None of that takes away from the solidly consistent year Dillon fashioned in winning his first championship. He had two wins, 16 top 10s in 25 races, notched a series-leading five poles and failed to finish only two races.

2. Johnny Sauter – Veteran driver matched Dillon in wins with a pair and had more top fives (11-10). Raced atop the point standings for 10 weeks but shot at the title was hurt by a string of finishes in the 20s in midseason.

3. Ron Hornaday Jr. – The “old man” of the series lost a shot at a fifth championship when he was wrecked by Kyle Busch in the season’s next-to-last race. But Hornaday carried Kevin Harvick’s trucks to glory in their final season, winning four times and scoring 13 top fives, a series high.

4. Kyle Busch – Rowdy raced in only 16 of the season’s 25 events, but he won six times, easily tops in that category. He finished out of the top five only five times.

5. Kevin Harvick – Like Busch, Harvick ran the series part-time, but he was up front every time. He won four of 10 races and finished in the top 10 in each outing.

6. James Buescher – Buescher became a force in the series in 2011, challenging for wins, winning three poles and scoring 10 top fives on the way to a third-place finish in points. Failure to qualify for the season’s second race – at Phoenix – soiled his stat sheet.

7. Timothy Peters – Peters picked up the third win of his career (at Lucas Oil Raceway) and stayed in the points hunt virtually all season despite a run of six straight races in which he failed to score a top 10.

8. Joey Coulter – Coulter had 13 top-10 finishes to be among the leaders in that category and rolled home seventh in points while also earning Rookie of the Year honors.

9. Todd Bodine – The defending series champion waded through sponsorship difficulties in 2011, and the result was a season that was a shadow of his 2010 title run. He finished almost half the races in the top 10 and managed a sixth in points despite no victories.

10. Matt Crafton – Crafton scored his second career win (at Iowa) and raced in the top three positions in points during the early months of the season. Four mediocre finishes in the last six races of the year left him eighth in the final standings.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 29 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

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Mike Hembree

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