Austin Hill gets second steak dinner after Beef 300 final lap wreck

Austin Hill probably had a feeling of déjà vu when he stood in Victory Lane at Daytona International Speedway to begin the 2023 NASCAR Xfinity Series season. Not only was it his second straight win in the Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner. 300, but it came following a dramatic flip on the final lap.

Unlike in 2022, Hill was directly involved in the crash this time when Sam Mayer spun off Hill’s front bumper on the backstretch while fighting for the lead and flipped onto his roof. As Mayer slid across the pavement, Hill ran three-abreast with John Hunter Nemechek and Justin Allgaier as the caution came out, with Hill being named the winner as the leader at the moment of the yellow flag following a lengthy review. Complicating matters was Nemechek going below the double-yellow line, which is forbidden at superspeedways unless to avoid a wreck.

“When I turned across my nose, I just figured caution is out, race is over,” said Hill. “But as soon as he turned across my nose, it allowed whoever was behind me—the #31 (Parker Retzlaff), #38 (Ryan Sieg), whoever the car was, I don’t know who it was—it allowed them to get to my bumper, and they just never lifted and they gave me a really big shot and they started pushing me down the back.

“I’m sitting there looking at the green light and looking at the #7 (Allgaier) beside me to see when the yellow light is going to come up, and as soon as I saw the yellow light I looked left, and it looked like I was ahead of the #7, but then I didn’t realise the #20 (Nemechek) is below the double yellow line. I’m like, ‘If they let that go, that’s going to be close between us.’ I was actually just thinking I’m racing the #7. I thought the #20 would get a penalty for going below the yellow, but I’m guessing the reason they let that slide was probably because the wreck happened and it made it to where he was probably trying to miss the wreck type thing.”

Hill won the pole and the first stage, while Allgaier claimed the second. The former has established himself as one of the top superspeedway racers in NASCAR’s national tiers, having also won at the superspeedway-like Atlanta in 2022 while his first Truck Series victory was at Daytona three years prior.

While certainly a great way to begin the Xfinity season, it also comes with some bittersweetness as he had failed to qualify for the Daytona 500 two days prior. Hill admitted as that “as confident as I am on these superspeedways, it does burn that I’m not going to be in the 500 because I truly believe that I could compete with all the Cup guys. I really think that I could go up there, race for a win, and I’m not saying that out of being cockiness or nothing, I just have that confidence in myself. I feel like I see things on the race track that a lot of other people don’t.

“I think when you get in the Cup level, the guys that see the same things I do, that stacks up a lot deeper than what you have in the Xfinity and Truck side. It would be a lot harder, don’t get me wrong, it would be way harder to get a win in the 500, and there’s a lot of people that are really good at what they do that have never achieved it, Hall of Famers that have never achieved it. I can’t sit here and say that I’d just go out there and win the 500, but I think I could compete. So I think that’s one thing that stings a little bit.”

Retzlaff finished a career-best fourth in his first race for Jordan Anderson Racing while Myatt Snider, the previous driver for JAR and the victim of the last-lap wreck in the 2022 race, was a spot behind him. Joe Graf Jr. also notched his best run in seventh for his maiden top ten outside Talladega.

“I don’t want anyone to flip at this race track,” Snider commented, now a part-time driver for Joe Gibbs Racing who worked with Nemechek coming to the finish. “I can confirm it is not very fun, but what is fun is racing this Tree Top GR Supra here at Daytona. […] I thought we had it there with John Hunter. I thought I pushed him to the win. I hate it that the #7 pushed him down below the double-yellow line. It was really, really close, but that’s what you deal with here. It’s spots and inches here. It is Daytona.”

True to Daytona, multiple front-runners were taken out in wrecks throughout the day including Hill’s Richard Childress Racing team-mate Sheldon Creed, who qualified fourth but was turned by Parker Kligerman and triggered a wreck that collected Jeffrey Earnhardt and Daniel Hemric. Earnhardt confronted Kligerman after the race, the latter of whom later conceded he had spun Creed “like a dufus” upon seeing the replay.

Race results