Austin Dillon has enjoyed his most success in the NASCAR Cup Series with Justin Alexander calling the shots and that was the primary driver behind the crew chief decision made this week.
Keith Rodden is off the box, reassigned within the engineering department at Richard Childress Racing, and Alexander is back on the road after spending the past year and a half within a similar department himself.
Ultimately, Dillon just felt like he needed a familiar and previously successful voice in his ear, after a disastrous start to the season that has him 28th in the standings after a 29th place result in 2023.
“He works really well with me, giving me the information during a race that I need, telling me what I need to hear,” Dillon said on Saturday at Martinsville Speedway. “Communication is half the battle once the race starts. If you can communicate better than the others about strategy and what the car needs, you can have better races.
“It’s been good for us if the past. Keith did a really good job at starting things and so does Justin but the things Justin and I have had over the years has been positive and I’m glad to have him back.”
Alexander brings back engineer Joel Keller too, who was also a force behind Dillon’s best seasons, including an 11th place championship result in 2022.
“It’s just a morale boost for the team, based on where we were headed with the NextGen car, having my best season in 2022 and then we lost that momentum and never could get it back going,” he said. “Getting Justin back on board with traveling is a big boost to our team and that’s the biggest thing.
“Justin and I wouldn’t have ever changed what we were doing but this schedule is brutal and he has two young kids and he wanted to do something different so we had to make a change. It was something he needed to do. We were able to talk him into coming back to the track and I’m really grateful he and his family, his wife, allowed him to come back to race with us.”
There’s no hard feelings towards Rodden. The communication, Dillon felt, wasn’t there. It was most public and obvious last weekend at Richmond where Dillon openly questioned the strategic decisions and then a slow pit stop where the No. 3 was called down pit road at the same time Justin Haley was completing a stop in the stall ahead of theirs.
“I haven’t had awful problems with our cars or lack of speed,” Dillon said. “You always need speed but I think Richmond was an example of where we started going to the front and we’d go to pit road and there was a guy in our stall, we get boxed in, lost 21 seconds on pit road, and we never would have lost a lap with the car we brought,” Dillon said.
“It’s just one of those things where execution at the track is the biggest thing. I thought Keith could communicate with me on a car level but we just couldn’t execute, whether it was me or him, but now Justin and I have proven we can execute together and hopefully the change is good for everybody.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.