Austin Dillon aggravated injury celebrating win over Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin

Austin Dillon aggravated an injury while celebrating his victory at Richmond Raceway on Sunday. Davey Segal of SiriusXM NASCAR Radio said that Dillon had a hurt oblique/rib that was aggravated by crew member Paul Swan when he “smacked him while celebrating.” Dillon was seen grimacing while at Victory Lane. He suffered the injury earlier in the week while playing basketball in Denny Hamlin‘s league.

Dillon wrecked Hamlin and Joey Logano during the final lap of the race that went into overtime. Hamlin and Logano have sounded off on Dillon, and while he’s not happy with what he did, Dillon knew he needed to make a big move to clinch a playoff spot.

“Unfortunately, the caution comes out with two to go. I just had to put my mind at ease and say ‘Hey look, we can do this,’” Dillon told Kevin Harvick on Victory Lane. “Pit crew, I got to give them a huge shoutout. We haven’t put them in positions to have that opportunity very often and they clutched it when it mattered. So we’re up front, we chose the bottom and maybe that wasn’t the right call. But I was going off of previous race wins off of that and I felt like if Joey takes inside, eight tires are going to be better than four. That was my other thing, I could protect a little better from the inside.”

Austin Dillon shares thought process on final lap of Richmond race

“When we fired, he rolled and he had a big roll on me. I wanted to go early in the box, and I waited a little too long. He rolled me and beat me to the start/finish line. That put me in a bad situation. Once I knew he had gotten the lead off of two, I just needed to make a corner that would give me an opportunity to get to him. Off of Turn 2, I felt like he had a slip off of four that kept me within a decent distance. I had a decent Turn 2 on the white flag lap, and then it was like whatever it took to get him up the track loose whatever it was.”

Dillon entered Sunday’s race near the bottom of the standings. He hadn’t won a race since the final regular season race of the 2022 season at Daytona, which gave him a spot in the playoffs.