When this season’s rookie class started to take shape and conversations were had about who would be at the top of the list, Ty Dillon wasn’t always included.

That’s something Dillon expected. He is, after all, driving for the independent Germain Racing team. While there is a technical alliance with Richard Childress Racing – the company owned by Dillon’s grandfather – the No. 13 team, led by Bootie Barker, works hard to make its own way.

So knowing he was going to be overshadowed by the likes of Erik Jones at Furniture Row Racing and Daniel Suarez at Joe Gibbs Racing, Dillon’s mindset coming into the season was simple: shock and awe. Eleven races in, Dillon believes his team is off to a good start.

“Just look at our year,” Dillon said over the weekend at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “We have improved every time we’ve hit the racetrack. I know at the beginning of this year when I talked to a lot of you guys at Media Day, I told you that is our main goal is every time we hit the racetrack is to get a little bit better. We have definitely done that.

“We started off getting a bad finish in Daytona, but we ran pretty well and pretty strong all day. Ever since then we have gotten better. Look at our race at Richmond when we cashed in segment points, ran inside the top 10 and probably a racetrack that nobody expected us to be inside the top 10 racing the guys that we were racing.”

Unfortunately for Dillon, contact coming to pit road negated his track position and he finished 26th. A week later, Dillon rebounded by avoiding the carnage of Talladega Superspeedway for a top-15 finish. It was the same two weeks ago at Kansas Speedway.

Approaching the three-month mark of the season, Dillon finds himself 21st in the standings with seven top-20 finishes (one more than Jones but one less than Suarez). As for that rookie battle, Dillon is second in points behind Suarez, who leads his competition with three top-10 finishes.

Dillon’s best finish in 11 races is a 13th at Talladega. His best start is a 14th at Texas Motor Speedway.

“We are sitting second in the rookie points and sitting in a good place to get the job done at the end of the year,” Dillon said. “We are there. I think people, like I said at the beginning of the year, are going to underestimate us a little bit, but we are competing and beating a lot of these teams that have a lot more resources right at their fingertips.”

The transition from Childress to Germain was hard, but Dillon said Germain has been like a family. But he hasn’t completely severed family ties; he is still involved with Childress through the Xfinity Series, where he gets plenty of seat time on the weekends when he runs double-duty and participates in the weekly meetings.

“We have a great relationship with RCR and our technical alliance, but Bootie and all the guys at Germain Racing are working their tails off to put me in a position to go out and compete for this Rookie of the Year championship,” Dillon said.

That’s an accomplishment only Dillon and his team saw coming.