Austin Dillon always looks forward to racing at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. After all, this is his hometrack. His last win in fact came at Charlotte in the 2017 Coca-Cola 600. While he didn’t win either race at Charlotte this year, he did shine.

Dillon qualified in Row 3 for Sunday’s Coke 600 and ran up front literally all night. He was seventh, eighth and ninth respectively in the three stages in that race. Unfortunately, despite restarting in the top five on the final restart, he faded to 14th.

On Thursday, he made up for that. Dillon, started seventh and finished seventh in both stages. He’d even bring his No. 3 Chevrolet home eighth.

“A top-10 finish is what we deserved in both this race, and in the Coca-Cola 600 this past Sunday,” Dillon said. “It’s crazy. We’ve run 900 miles at Charlotte Motor Speedway over the past few days and we were an eighth-place car for all of it. We had spurts where we were really fast – top five at times. Justin Alexander, the pit crew, my spotter Brandon, everybody did a great job. It was fun. I had fun on the restarts, and we were able to pick up some Stage points. We were just a little too free tonight. It was good on the long runs because it was free, but during the first 10 laps if you didn’t get going you would lose a couple of spots. We needed a little better take off speed. We’ll keep working. Bristol Motor Speedway is next. I’m loving it. A lot of miles in a short period of time.”