Austin Hill’s move into a full-time Cup ride was never part of anyone’s plan, which is what makes Monday’s news land differently than a typical contract story. Hill and Richard Childress Racing have reportedly agreed to keep him in the No. 33 Chevrolet through 2027, according to a report from The Athletic’s Jordan Bianchi.
Nothing is official yet. Neither RCR nor Hill has confirmed the extension publicly, and Bianchi’s own report notes an announcement could come the same day. Until that happens, this is a reported deal, not a finalized one.
The backstory here runs through a press conference at Michigan that was never supposed to be about Hill at all. Richard Childress has said that sitdown was originally arranged to announce a contract extension for Kyle Busch through 2027. Busch died in May at 41 from complications of severe pneumonia and sepsis, and Childress used that same setting months later to talk about grief instead, at one point saying, “I haven’t slept very good lately, I’ll leave it at that.”
RCR retired the No. 8 outright rather than rotate substitutes through it, setting the number aside for Busch’s young son, and built a new No. 33 entry around Hill beginning with the Coca-Cola 600.
Hill’s audition in that car has been appropriately rough for a driver with almost no national-series stock car experience before this year. His 20th-place run in the FireKeepers Casino 400 at Michigan came in just his second Cup start, and it happened to be the same race weekend where Childress made his 2027 comments about Busch. A later incident with Shane van Gisbergen at Chicagoland drew no penalty, which underscores how NASCAR and RCR alike have treated Hill’s season as a substitution rather than a normal full-time campaign.
The stronger case for Hill isn’t those handful of Cup starts, though — it’s four full-time seasons in the O’Reilly Series, where he’s a 16-time winner, the 2020 regular-season champion, and currently sits seventh in the 2026 standings with two wins in 23 races.
Locking Hill into the No. 33 for 2027 settles half of RCR’s Cup lineup alongside Austin Dillon, but it also leaves a real question unanswered: who takes over the No. 21 O’Reilly Series car Hill would be leaving behind, at a moment when the series itself is still sorting out its own 2027 schedule.
Hill’s deal fits into a broader summer of 2027 paperwork around the garage — Front Row Motorsports locking up Noah Gragson, and Hendrick Motorsports extending Connor Zilisch through the decade despite a 34th-place points standing — a sign that teams are willing to commit to 2027 well before this season is finished.
The tribute paint scheme Mars brought back to Bristol earlier this month wasn’t really about a car. It was about the same thing behind Childress’s decision to keep Hill around — a team trying to find its way forward after losing one of its own, one race and one contract at a time.
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