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AVONDALE, Ariz. — The relationship between crew chief and driver is always an interesting one. The crew chief can serve as coach, confidant, motivator, psychologist and in the case of Austin Dillon and Slugger Labbe, a “brother.”
“We are like two brothers a little bit. We are both very aggressive personalities,” Dillon said of his crew chief on Friday at Phoenix International Raceway, site of Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Good Sam 500 (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). “He is not afraid to tell me when he thinks I’ve messed up and I’m not afraid to tell him when I think he has messed up.”
Dillon and Labbe’s fiery exchange last weekend during the Sprint Cup Series Kobalt 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway showcased the intensity of both sides during a tire call on a pit stop at the 1.5-mile track. Dillon went on to overcome a speeding penalty on pit road to record a fifth-place finish in the race, his first top five of the season and first at an intermediate track in his Sprint Cup career.
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“It’s a part of being intense,” Dillon said. “I’ve been intense in all the different levels of racing I’ve come up through here. I felt like we lacked a little bit of that intensity that I’m used to when we got to the Cup Series. Slugger kind of brought that back to me.”
Dillon likened his communication with Labbe to that which he had with Danny Stockman Jr., who guided him to championships in the NASCAR XFINITY Series (in 2013) and the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series (in 2011). Stockman is now the crew chief for the No. 2 XFINITY Series team for which Dillon is one of the drivers.
“Slugger is really good at being blunt with things and I’ve learned to be able to take it, and he can take it, too. That is what I love about him. I can tell him right to his face, ‘Hey this is no good.’ He will go to work on it. Same with me, if he thinks I’m not driving right, I will go to work, too.
“We’ve got a pretty good understanding throughout our team that we are a family on and off the track. If we get into each other, it’s like the big brother/little brother rule — you can mess with him all you want, but no one else can. When it comes down to it, we’ve got each other’s backs. We want the best, we want to win.”
That intensity has served him well in his pairing with Labbe thus far as Dillon moves closer to getting to Victory Lane for the first time in the Sprint Cup Series. The driver of the No. 3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet is enjoying the best stretch of his Cup career. The 25-year-old sits ninth in the point standings coming into Phoenix thanks to a top five, two top 10s and a near top 10. (A ninth-place at Daytona and a fifth-place at Las Vegas with an 11th-place finish at Atlanta in between.)
“If you look back to last year, we have kind of had this streak going to the end of last year,” Dillon said. “I really enjoy working with Slugger and my group of engineers that are with me. … The work is paying off we just have to keep plugging along and never stop working.”
Since Labbe was placed atop the pit box for the No. 3 team in late June of 2015, Dillon has six top 10s in 24 races with the veteran crew chief. To put that in perspective, Dillon recorded just five top 10s with Gil Martin on top of the pit box for 51 races before RCR made the crew chief change.
With those gains, Dillon’s growth as a driver has not gone unnoticed in the garage.
“I think Austin himself is a student of the sport and he’s paid attention to what he needs to do, how he needs to do things and he continuously gets better,” Kevin Harvick, driver of the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet and a former driver at RCR, said on Friday.
“You can see that from the outside looking in that he wants to concentrate on his job and he wants to go out and get better each and every week. I think a lot of that really started to stem last year from the success that he had in the XFINITY car. As we went through the year, the more success he had, the better he got on Sunday. I think a lot of that just has to do with him getting better as a driver. He is in tune with what is happening on the race track and with the race car it seems just by looking in.”
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