RELATED: XFINITY Series Playoff standings
DOVER, Del. – Matt Tifft had to overcome early adversity for a strong finish in the Use Your Melon Drive Sober 200 at Dover International Speedway on Saturday, but that is nothing new for the XFINITY Series rookie.
Tifft had to start from the rear because of a tire change after qualifying, sacrificing a 23rd-place starting spot. A Lap 6 accident just served as another setback for Joe Gibbs Racing driver before he worked his way up, jumping into the top 10 just past the midway point of the 200-lap race at the “Monster Mile.”
“You got to be super patient,” Tifft said of moving through the field over the course of a race. “… We were just trying to be smart and we kind of knew we were going to have an uphill battle starting from the back. Right off the bat, we got smacked in the back. I was hoping the damage wasn’t going to be too severe and it wasn’t. Really didn’t affect us at all.”
Tifft would go on to earn to a sixth-place finish in his No. 19 entry and come in as the highest finishing Toyota driver, an even more impressive effort when his teammates for the day were Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series rookies Daniel Suarez and Erik Jones. The result also marked the third straight top 10 for the 21-year-old Ohio native.
This season marks Tifft’s first full-time season in a NASCAR national series. He underwent brain surgery on July 1, 2016 to remove a low-grade, benign brain tumor that kept him sidelined for about two-and-a-half months last year.
The result was also important for Tifft’s XFINITY Series Playoff outlook as he extended his point cushion to 14 points to the good over ninth-place Brendan Gaughan. Tifft sits in seventh, 12 points ahead of Ryan Reed in eighth. The drivers who will compose the Round of 8 will be set after the Drive for the Cure 300 Presented by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Saturday (3 p.m. ET on NBCSN, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
“Great day for our team and we just need to keep that consistency rolling through next week in Charlotte,” Tifft said. “Nothing set in stone yet. We just need to keep plugging away like we are right now.”
Tifft finished 26th at Charlotte in the spring, but nabbed two top 10s on the 1.5-mile tracks of Chicago and Kentucky in September. And on top of that, he finished eighth in Charlotte’s fall race last year.
“We didn’t have the greatest run at Charlotte earlier in the year,” Tifft said. “Going to Chicagoland, I thought we learned a lot about some rough and wore-out places like that. I feel like we have a good outlook on that place and we had a solid run there in the fall before.”