Austin Hill on late contact with Shane van Gisbergen at Sonoma: ‘I plead the fifth’

At the end of today’s Xfinity Series race at Sonoma, Austin Hill and Shane van Gisbergen were once again making contact. Ever since COTA, these two have found each other on NASCAR road courses.

The Austin Hill and SVG rivalry is in full swing at the moment. Every time they get next to one another it feels like something big is going to happen. Today, something big did happen. SVG put a hard move on Hill during a restart and ran away afterward.

It was the winning move, ultimately. Van Gisbergen raced to the win while Hill came up in P5. Not terrible, but he did get a win taken from him. Payback from COTA?

After the race, Hill was not pleased. However, he refrained from comment, for the most part.

“I didn’t really see the replay the best – blacked out – but, you know, I’m just going to leave it to the keyboard warriors on this one; I’ll let them figure out what happened,” he said on FOX Sports, via SpeedCafe.

“I’m sure, no matter what comment I say, it’ll be wrong.”

Then he watched the replay live on the postrace broadcast.

“Um, yeah, I don’t know… I plead the Fifth; I’m not going to say anything about it. We’ll just go on to the next one. Good hard racing, the Bennett Chevrolet was as fast as Xfinity internet, we were holding off SVG there for a while.

“I had that caution, I knew it was going to be tough on the restart, and it didn’t work out but we had a good points day, finished in the top five… Can’t ask for more than that.”

Hill just couldn’t fight off van Gisbergen in the end.

Austin Hill gets moved by SVG

The end of the Xfinity Series race was the most interesting part. A huge wreck to start the third stage collected 14 cars total and took out Ty Gibbs who won Stage 2. Then a late caution from Jesse Love reset the field and gave us fireworks.

SVG used his door, but not in an egregious way. He had gotten to the inside of Hill going into one of the early turns. The two came together, it put Hill in a bad spot and he dropped like a rock. He would recover to finish P5.

Today all eyes were on Shane van Gisbergen. He was the fastest in practice, qualifying, and he ended up winning the race in the end. A complete weekend from start to finish.