Austin Hill’s driving performance in the 2026 season is now becoming one of the biggest surprises inside the NASCAR Xfinity garage. For a driver who has always prioritized his consistency and clean execution alongside mind-boggling speed, this season seems unstable.

Yet the driver believes that the No. 21 Richard Childress Racing team continues to be a strong contender in the championship fight.

“It’s been one of those roller coaster starts to the season,” Hill admitted. “We haven’t performed as we should. The entire 21 team knows it. We’ve shown signs of good runs.”

The frustration has continued for weeks. However, some respite came at Dover, granting the team a top-five finish after a 10-race drought, the longest of Hill’s career. Yet Hill continues to bet that the speed is there.

“I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” he explained. “We are still a contender; we’re still a top-five team each and every time we go on the race track. It’s just putting these races together, minimizing our mistakes on the track and minimizing things that have happened with the race that the outside world doesn’t see.”

This pestering issue of non-performance is now also dragging on mentally for the driver.

“It’s been very frustrating and mentally taxing on me as a driver,” Hill said. “To start the season off earlier in the year, I’m like, this is the 21 team, this is what we do, we run inside the top five every week. Then, it slowly digressed.”

However, RCR leadership also supports Hill’s statements and seems staunch on finding the racing line and speed that we all have been looking for. “We’re not in panic mode,” Danny Lawrence stated. “Top fives are great, but it’s not what we want. We want to be winning.”

And now, additionally, Austin Hill will also fill in for Kyle Busch's No. 8 in the Cup race after the latter was hospitalized and will be out of the racing weekend at Charlotte.

But what is this unstable performance that everyone has been talking about, and how has it been going recently for the team? Let’s find out.

Consistency has completely disappeared for Austin Hill

The reason that everyone feared the once great No. 21 team was their consistency, but this year it just seems to have watered down. After opening the year by winning Daytona from pole position while leading 78 laps, Hill managed just two more top-five finishes over the next 13 races.

These numbers were also explicit in the statistics. In 2023, Hill averaged around an 8.97 finish, but now in 2026 that number has dropped to a career-low 12.86, backed by multiple disastrous finishes such as 35th at Darlington and 34th at Kansas despite a strong qualifying pace.

This strong qualifying pace is the exact hope for the team, combined with respite at Dover. If they again manage to consistently hit this pace, then hope would reignite for a team that seems a bit lost halfway into the 2026 season.

Read more at the RFK Racing Digest!

Written by

Uday Jakhar

Edited by

Suyashdeep Sason