Ty Dillon is currently in the NASCAR headlines. He is the star of the In-Season Tournament, smashing all the brackets so far in the five-race battle. But besides the stardom of zooming past the Cup Series’ most respected veterans in a million-dollar race, Dillon is in the spotlight for another reason. After all, he is Richard Childress’ grandson, who has been away from his grandfather’s team.

Richard Childress Racing has been in the doldrums for the past few years. With Kyle Busch and Austin Dillon giving their best to turn things around, Childress did some revamps in the 2024 off-season. Among those revamps was a plan to rope in next of kin, as Ty Dillon recently confessed.

Ty Dillon is balancing his ambition with familial tradition

The tradition of RCR has a rich history. In 1969, Richard Childress wheeled the No. 13 Chevrolet as a part-time field-filling entry in the inaugural race at Talladega, then called Alabama Superspeedway. The money Childress earned in that event 56 years ago allowed him to purchase land, build his first shop, and lay the foundation of Richard Childress Racing. Ty Dillon used a throwback scheme honoring his grandfather’s early effort in a 2019 Talladega race, and now, he can honor it more realistically.

In 2024, Dillon wheeled the No. 33 RCR Chevy at the Brickyard 400, almost a decade after he had last wheeled an RCR car. Despite spending the last five seasons bouncing around all three national series, now Dillon has a fixed goal in mind. In his full-time 2025 endeavor wheeling the No. 10 Chevy for Kaulig Racing, Ty Dillon stands 31st in the championship standings. He clinched a lone top ten in Atlanta, finishing in 8th place. However, he is determined as ever to improve his career with the help of his grandfather’s dynasty.

Dillon divulged potential plans of joining Richard Childress in an interview with Claire B. Lang: “The RCR stuff…that is something that we’re passionate about. I think that he’s seeing that getting us more and more involved slowly. It’s not been a whole lot, but we’ve been spending time with him, he’s a wealth of information for so many things. So it is something that Austin [Dillon] and I are very excited about in our futures.” 

With Richard Childress Racing and Kaulig having a technical alliance via Chevrolet, Dillon has the opportunity to mesh with his brother and grandfather more than he’s done before in the Cup Series. And this seems to have had a positive impact on Dillon’s racing, as he seems motivated as ever while tackling the In-Season Challenge.

In the 2024 off-season, Childress introduced changes, like recruiting Keith Rodden as the interim director and Richard Boswell as Austin Dillon’s No. 3 crew chief. Now, Ty Dillon is looking forward to contributing to this change. He confessed feeling pumped about working with his brother Austin again: “We’ve had probably the most unique perspectives on the sport, being owners, grandsons, and drivers who have now competed in about 250 Cup races together as brothers. We’re excited for that next chapter, but we’re also both very hungry for where our feet are now as far as race car drivers. It’s fun to be teammates with him again; in a sense, there is a technical alliance. There’s a lot of cool things that can happen in the future.”

Meanwhile, however, Ty Dillon can rejoice a little bit in a well-deserved victory.

Dillon was surprised by his own talent

After all, Lady Luck has been sparing with her gifts for Ty Dillon. The Kaulig Racing driver has not won a NASCAR race since the 2014 Xfinity Series race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Dillon owns only eight top-10 finishes in 265 Cup Series starts, and six of them were on superspeedways. He lost his ride at Germain Racing in the 2020 season and almost quit in 2021.

Despite all these challenges, Dillon resiliently stuck to his career and found his way back to Cup racing in 2025. Although his overall stats have not been impressive, the In-Season Tournament boosted his motivation like nothing else. The first round of the bracket challenge saw him knock out 56-time Cup race winner Denny Hamlin. Then Brad Keselowski also had to yield.

In last weekend’s Sonoma race, Ty Dillon was paired up with Alex Bowman. And the jaw-dropping moves he made to topple the road course racer surprised everybody, including himself. “I’m a little in shock,” Dillon said after proceeding to the next round. Dillon used a last lap bump-and-run to shove Bowman out of the way, as he reflected: “He passed me clean — we all got checked up at (Turn) 11; he got around me on the outside. And my goal on the last lap was just try to be close enough getting into 11 where I could move him off the bottom and try to drag race him back.” Dillon added, “If it wasn’t for a million dollars, I probably would have never punted him for that position.”

Clearly, Ty Dillon is here to play. With the 2025 season rolling forward, we can only imagine the magic he will conjure in future races.