Austin Hill turned NASCAR’s first O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race at Naval Base Coronado into a Richard Childress Racing win, beating Taylor Gray by 1.127 seconds after a chaotic San Diego finish.
Hill, who started fourth, led 13 of the 60 laps around the 3.4-mile Qualcomm Circuit and came home ahead of Gray, Sheldon Creed, Carson Kvapil and Sammy Smith. The result gave RCR the first Saturday victory of NASCAR’s new San Diego weekend and shifted the story away from Joe Gibbs Racing’s mid-race control.
Hill makes the late spell count
Gray had looked central to the race after taking Stage 2, a run that had already made the event feel like a JGR survival test rather than a simple track-position contest. But Hill’s closing stint had the cleaner execution, and NASCAR’s official results credited him with the win, 68 points, 13 laps led and the fastest-lap benchmark among the front runners.
Gray still salvaged second after leading 16 laps, while Creed and Kvapil kept Chevrolet heavy at the sharp end. Smith completed the top five, with Jesse Love recovering to sixth after a difficult start to a weekend that was already loaded with attention because of his future Cup move and title-defence pressure.
Crews’ pole becomes a missed chance
The result was harder on Brent Crews. He had put Joe Gibbs Racing on pole and entered the race with a bigger spotlight because of his wider San Diego role, but after the promise of his standby-linked qualifying run, the final classification left him 18th, three laps down.
That made Hill’s win feel less like a straightforward road-course conversion and more like a piece of race management on a new venue that had been waiting all weekend to punish small mistakes. The O’Reilly race had already been split by cautions and shifting control phases, and the final order underlined how quickly Coronado could turn speed into recovery work.
For NASCAR, the headline is a clean one: the first O’Reilly race on the base produced a recognised winner, a bruising learning curve for several contenders and another layer of intrigue before Sunday’s Cup race takes over the same concrete-lined course.
Source: NASCAR official San Diego race results; Jayski Naval Base Coronado race page.
