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NASCAR America: Austin Dillon greets Darlington fans at 4 a.m. -- until a gun shows up

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Austin Dillon answers questions from the Twitter mailbag, including one about his 4 a.m. visit with fans at Darlington.

It was 4 a.m. early Monday morning at Darlington, and Austin Dillon couldn’t sleep after the Bojangles’ Southern 500.

It was kind of understandable: when you finish fourth at a place like the Track Too Tough To Tame, sometimes you get so wired that it’s hard to go to sleep.

And, the way Dillon figured it, if he can’t sleep, he wasn’t going to let others sleep -- in a nice and fun way, that is, kind of.

Dillon and a couple of his also wide-awake buddies left his motor home in the infield and walked and rode around, looking for others that were also up at that point in the middle of the night.

“We had a solid run so I just hung out outside my motor home a little bit, had a couple nice drinks and still had my driver’s suit on,” Dillon retold the story on Wednesday’s NASCAR America. “We decided to check out the track, so a couple of us rode my golf cart around the track a couple times, and that was cool.”

And this is where the story gets all the more funny -- and risky.

“Heck, I wanted to go see what the fans were up to, so we rolled into the infield and I walked into a couple motor homes,” Dillon said. “It was 4 in the morning at this point. They had gone night-night.

“People were starting to leave, it was pretty funny. I was waving to them, signing autographs. This lady had an Austin Dillon shirt on, leaving with her husband, taking their motor home out at 4:30 a.m.”

Everything was fun and games up to that point -- until Dillon walked in the wrong RV.

“We walked in a motor home and one guy said, ‘I’ve got a gun in my sleeping bag,’” Dillon said. “I said, ‘Hey, man, I’m not Kyle Busch, it’s OK.’”

Follow @JerryBonkowski