(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)
By Aaron Bearden
After years of building his way up the racing ladder, Austin Hill has a chance to make a leap into championship contention this year in the NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series with defending champions Hattori Racing Enterprises.
It’s a moment he’s waited his entire life for – and one he wasn’t sure would ever come.
“I never thought in a million years that I would be with a team like HRE,” Hill told Motorsports Beat. “I feel like they’re like a (Kyle Busch Motorsports)-level team. They’re that good. obviously they went out and won the championship, beat all the KBM and (GMS Racing) guys.”
A native Georgian, Hill has spent the majority of his racing career chasing his dreams in family equipment. He started watching racing at three years old, sitting on the couch with his father and cheering on then-rising star Jeff Gordon.
Watching the Rainbow Warrior and others on-track made Hill want to race. His father shrugged off the young Hill’s pleas in the early days, but relented and acquired his son quarter midget when he was six.
From there the chase was on.
“We did quarter midget stuff for a while, kind of stayed local,” Hill said. “Then we started traveling around. When I turned nine or 10, I started running bandoleros and would go to Charlotte a lot.
“We’d race at Atlanta Motor Speedway a lot, started traveling around and would rave the national races they had at the end of the season. Then we got in the legends car series, started doing asphalt late models when I was 15. I ran those for a while, but didn’t ever do a full season with them. We started doing the ASA deal they used to have, but they ended up going bankrupt during the season we were running with them. So we kind of jumped around racing those.”
A passionate driver with a talent behind the wheel, Hill steadily worked his way through the grassroots rungs of American motorsport, winning championships along the way. He competed for his own family own team – first known as Hill Brothers Racing, but later altered to Austin Hill Racing when Hill’s middle brother got out of the sport.
There was a short time in his formative years when Hill nearly got out of the industry. A short stint in dirt late models faded away as the economic struggles of the Great Recession impacted the United States in the late 2000s. For two years Hill ran only a handful of Legends car races, competing solely with his own funding.
But the moment things stabilized and it was feasible for Hill to continue on, he bounced back into the cockpit. He made a significant leap up – rising to the NASCAR K&N Pro Series.
Hill made his debut in the Pro Series East in 2012 on the bullring Columbus Motor Speedway, and later tacked on a second start at Greenville-Pickens Speedway. He returned with the family team for a five-race run in 2013, and impressed with a win in his final start of the year at Dover International Speedway.
The 2014 season brought a leap to full-time competition, and a fifth-place finish in the championship standings. A third-place effort followed in 2015, with Hill contending for the championship until the closing weeks of the season. He lost out to William Byron – the driver that now pilots the No. 24 Chevrolet made famous by Hill’s childhood idol. Drivers finishing behind the prospect included dirt ace Rico Abreu and Truck Series winners Justin Haley and Kaz Grala.
The performances were notable for Hill, because they had all come for his family team. While a humble operation, the group worked tirelessly to give Hill an opportunity to compete. He capitalized on the chance to earn five victories in 35 starts from 2013 through 2015.
“From the time I was six until 22, we did it all on our own,” he said. “If there was a new series we went into, we would hire a crew chief or mechanic to help us get going, but we always did it on our own. Always had a family owned race team.”
During the latter stages of the run Hill began to ease into the Truck Series, but the funding needed to compete full-time and at a high level proved difficult to find. He made a handful of starts in 2014 and 2015, increased his schedule to 10 races in 2016 and topped out at 12 starts in 2017. Only last year did Hill finally get to complete the full season, driving in a partnership with Tyler Young and Young’s Motorsports.
“We forged an alliance last year where I came to run for (Tyler) and we brought three of my trucks with me,” Hill said. “I ran my truck some races, his truck some other races. We just came together as a whole to run a full season.”
The pairing didn’t have the top-tier equipment needed to consistently battle among the title contenders, but they had a few highlights along the way. Hill scored his first top 10 of the year in the third race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, followed with another in the ensuing race at Martinsville Speedway and poured on four more over the second half of the season – including a career-best finish of fifth at Texas Motor Speedway.
The runs were enough for Hill to be content. But over the fall months the opportunity for something greater began to unfold.
While Hill was toiling in the mid-pack, HRE was in the midst of a rise to the top of the Truck Series. Brett Moffitt clinched the organization’s first playoff berth in the second race of the season at Atlanta Motor Speedway, and began rattling off wins with reckless abandon en-route to a Championship 4 appearance.
HRE’s story was the feel-good story of the season, but underneath the surface a constant struggle for funding threatened to undermine the entire operation. The team managed to stay afloat each week to keep Moffitt’s title pursuit alive, but as the year wound down the organization was left with a need to search for alternative options for 2019.
One of the first people they contacted was Hill.
“It really kind of came together over the last five races of the season,” Hill said. “(General manager Mike) Greci said they didn’t have anything planned for 2019 yet, and he wanted to speak with me first before speaking to anybody else, because he really liked me and wanted me to run under a program that he ran.”
Hill didn’t want to interfere with the team’s championship pursuit, so talks were kept quiet until the end of the season. The 24-year-old told Motorsports Beat nothing was finalized until after the season finale “because we wanted to make sure nothing was taken away from Brett and his chances at winning the championship, and the whole team for that matter.”
But a deal was ultimately reached a few weeks after the season, with financial support from United Rentals. An announcement came shortly after the holiday season.
Backlash quickly followed.
Hill became a victim of circumstances when the announcement was made. While successful in lower levels of racing, the young prospect wasn’t a recognizable name to the casual NASCAR fan. That he was replacing Moffitt — a series champion that once made waves with solid performances in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series — was seen as a slight to the Iowan.
People that knew Hill were quick to defend him, but others took the opportunity to lash out at Hill and HRE. Hill stayed quiet on his social media feeds, but he saw the vitriol trickling out onto social media.
“I probably read every single comment and message that was sent through Twitter and everything else, just to see what was said,” Hill said. “Honestly we had a lot of good stuff said about me, going into HRE and the team itself. I thought that was really cool, having guys like (spotter) Freddie Kraft and a few others that really spoke highly of me and thought that I deserved a chance of it.
“Reading all of the other comments, the people that were saying negative things have no idea about me. They don’t know me at all. They have no idea of the background I came from. Daddy’s money didn’t get me here, by (any) means. I dug deep and worked my butt off to get to this point.
“I’m not the type of driver that’s just a helmet holder, shows up and turns the steering wheel.”
The initial backlash withstood, Hill has had the last month to prepare for the upcoming season. He’s noticed an immediate difference in his limited time with HRE to date, with changes he believes will help him focus on improving as a driver in the upcoming season.
“It’s definitely a different atmosphere,” he said. “I’m so used to working on the trucks, cars and all that. I still do it a little bit here, but it’s nothing like it was when we had our own deal. I was kind of doing a lot of my own stuff with the few guys we had. This is a little more relaxed for me. I get to work on my training a lot more. I don’t have to worry about the business side of it and all that.”
Moffitt secured a ride of his own at GMS Racing, meaning the pair will compete against each other this year. Hill has dreams of proving the early doubters wrong and matching the star’s championship drive of 2018, but he’s entering the season with reasonable expectations.
“I’m the type of guy that really likes for my finishes and what I do on the track to speak for me,” Hill said. “My expectation and goal going into 2019 is to win some races. Bottom line. If we end up winning the championship, great. I want to win the championship, and they did it last year. So I really want to push for that.
“But it’s one of those deals where everything has to come together. The way the new format is with NASCAR, anything can happen. You have one bad race, go to the next race and don’t run well… When you’re in the final six or eight, it can end your whole championship run.”
Hill has dreams of claiming the Truck title, parlaying it into an Xfinity Series ride and climbing up to the Cup Series in 2021. He spent his childhood years wanting nothing more than to battle with drivers like Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., but even with them retired the opportunity to test his skill and endurance on NASCAR’s top tour is the end goal.
But even if that doesn’t happen Hill will be content. The Georgian has already obtained something many don’t reach in a top-tier opportunity with a NASCAR national series. From here the young star has the same simple goal as most racers in the world.
He just wants to race.
“I want to be racing for as long as I can, until I can’t do it any more,” Hill said. “That’s the long-term goal, and I’m sure to an extent that’s everybody’s goal. I just want to be out there competing in the sport I love.”
