With the 2018 season getting further and further in the rearview, it’s time to take a look back and the highs and lows of each Cup Series team in 2018. Next up, Richard Childress Racing.
Ryan Newman
Points position: 17
Top 10s: 9
Season highlight: Newman has been known for being a part of some of the wildest restrictor plate wrecks in recent NASCAR history. Well, three of his nine top-10 finishes on the season came at Daytona and Talladega. He even escaped a crash in the fall Talladega race but ended up finishing 25th.
Outside of that, there wasn’t much of anything to brag about. Newman’s best finish of the season came when he was sixth at New Hampshire. Otherwise he was pretty much a guy who would solidly finish around 15th every week. His average finish was 17.2 on the season and with nine top 10s … yeah, 15th is pretty much where Newman loomed.
Season lowlight: Newman had a brutal May and June. The two months pretty much guaranteed that he wasn’t going to make the playoffs without winning. In the six races from Dover to Sonoma, Newman went 33rd, 30th, 35th, 25th, 22nd and 24th. He was 16th before Dover and and 22nd after Sonoma.
Newman clawed his way back to 17th by the summer Bristol race on the strength of three top-10 finishes in four races, but his playoff hopes were toast at that point even though he was ahead of teammate Austin Dillon when the regular season came to a close. But unlike Newman, Dillon won a race.
Newman heads over to Roush Fenway Racing for 2019 in a move that can be described as a lateral one at best.
Austin Dillon
Points position: 13th
Top 10s: 8
Top 5s: 2
Wins: 1
Season highlight: Well this one is pretty obvious, don’t you think? Dillon won a frantic Daytona 500 with a last-lap maneuver (or bulldozer if you prefer) that will be replayed for the rest of NASCAR’s existence. Dillon bumped Aric Almirola out of the lead and into the wall entering turn three and drove to the win ahead of Bubba Wallace and Denny Hamlin. While Dillon’s move wasn’t greeted with universal approval, you’d wreck someone for the Daytona 500, right? Especially if lifting off the gas would lead to getting crashed yourself.
Season lowlight: The win qualified Dillon for the playoffs but the Roval was his demise. After finishes of 11th and sixth in the first two playoff races, Dillon just simply had to hold serve to advance to the second round. He crashed out and finished 39th.
The team’s playoff performance was better than it had been in the first 26 races of the season. Yeah, the Roval stunk and Dillon was 30th at Martinsville but he got four of his eight top-10 finishes in the final 10 races of the season and also finished 11th three times. Given that Dillon’s average finish on the season was 17.5, the No. 3 bunch has to be satisfied with the way the final stretch of the season went.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
Follow @NickBromberg on Twitter
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