Austin Dillon will have an extremely busy weekend at Atlanta.
Not only will Dillon compete in Sunday’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 race, but the 26-year-old will also compete in the double-header races at the 1.5-mile track Saturday running both the XFINITY Series race for Richard Childress Racing and the Truck Series race for MDM Motorsports.
MDM owned by entrepreneur Matthew Miller plans to compete in the Truck Series full-time in 2017 with a variety of drivers. Brandon Jones, Dillon’s teammate at RCR ran several races for the organization last season in a partnership with the now defunct Contreras Motorsports.
“It will be fun,” Dillon told CATCHFENCE.com this past weekend at Daytona. “I’m looking forward to it. “We had that one race last year at Texas with that same group. We’ll see what we got.”
Last November, the 2011 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series champion made his lone Truck Series start of the season at Texas Motor Speedway qualifying 22nd before rallying to finish eighth.
“We didn’t qualify real well, but we raced pretty good,” recalled Dillon. “If we could have pitted the truck, we would have won the race. Excited to give it another try.”
MDM acquired the owner’s points from the now closed Athenian Motorsports before the start of the season. Truck Series regular Tommy Joe Martins competed in this past Friday’s NextEra Energy Resources 250 under their banner, but was one of at least 16 trucks collected in a second lap crash, finishing 32nd.
At Daytona, Dillon was in contention for a top-10 finish in the season-opening Daytona 500, but ran out of gas before the finish, claiming 19th. In the XFINITY Series opener, Dillon recovered from being involved in one of the event’s many crashes to finish third behind Ryan Reed and Kasey Kahne.
Dillon joins Kyle Busch who will also compete in all three NASCAR national series events this weekend at Atlanta.
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
