On Friday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Ty Dillon took a giant stride in the footsteps of his brother.
Taking advantage of Kyle Busch's brush with the wall late in the late race, pole-sitter Dillon won going away during Jeff Foxworthy's Grit Chips 200, the first victory for the Camping World Truck Series rookie.
Busch ran second, 3.227 seconds behind the winner. James Buescher finished third, followed by Parker Kligerman and Aric Almirola. Series leader Timothy Peters was 13th.
Dillon, 20, grandson of team owner Richard Childress, is third in the standings, nine points behind Peters, as he tries to duplicate the Truck Series championship won by 22-year-old brother Austin Dillon last year.
"I'm just so happy for how hard we've worked," Ty Dillon said. "It's our rookie year, and we're battling for the championship. My team doesn't give up.
"Man, I'm just so happy and so excited. I finally won a NASCAR race. It's been my whole life, and to finally do it means so much. Man, it's awesome."
Busch, Buescher (second in the standings, six points back) and Dillon swapped the lead between them eight times in a 25-lap stretch before Busch began to pull away. After a cycle of green-flag stops that started with Dillon's trip down pit road on Lap 82, Busch held a five-second lead, but a caution for debris on the backstretch on Lap 105 slowed the race and bunched the field.
Lead-lap trucks came to pit road on Lap 106, eliminating the need for fuel conservation the rest of the way. After a restart on Lap 110, Busch pulled to a 1-second lead as Dillon and Buescher battled for second behind him.
But Busch scraped the wall on the final run and damaged his truck, allowing Dillon to overtake him for the lead on Lap 125 of 130.
Busch said Dillon's truck was simply better.
"He had a lot better handle on the bottom of the race track than we did, especially throughout the longer run," Busch said. "He could hold the bottom better than I could. There, when it's time to race, when a guy catches you, you've got to go somewhere else.
"You've got to go to the top, and you try to push and get sideways and hit the fence. There's no room to catch it up there. It was all I could do to push it as hard as I could."
Bad luck continued to haunt four-time champion Ron Hornaday Jr., still seeking his first victory since joining Joe Denette Motorsports at the end of the season. On Lap 37, contact with Tim George Jr. trapped Hornaday against the outside wall in a wreck that also collected Jason White.
Grit Chips 200 Results:
1. Ty Dillon (R)
2. Kyle Busch
3. James Buescher
4. Parker Kligerman
5. Aric Almirola
6. Kyle Larson
7. Joey Coulter
8. Nelson Piquet Jr.
9. Matt Crafton
10. Kurt Busch
11. Ryan Blaney
12. Johnny Sauter
13. Timothy Peters
14. Justin Lofton
15. Cale Gale (R)
16. Miguel Paludo
17. Ryan Sieg
18. David Starr
19. John Wes Townley (R)
20. Ross Chastain (R)
Truck Series Standings:
1. Timothy Peters
2. James Buescher, -6
3. Ty Dillon (R), -9
4. Parker Kligerman, -21
5. Justin Lofton, -31
6. Joey Coulter, -44
7. Matt Crafton, -45
8. Nelson Piquet Jr., -74
9. Ron Hornaday, -102
10. Jason White, -112
NASCAR Wire Service, photo courtesy of NASCARmedia.com
