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All four RFR drivers – Chris Buescher, Ryan Reed, Darrell Wallace Jr. and Elliott Sadler — finished in the top-12 that afternoon, and while they were encouraged by their results, they weren’t satisfied. At all.
"We should have had a better finish,” said 21-year-old Ryan Reed of his 11th-place effort. "We’re improving and getting better every week. But I think we still have a lot of room to grow. I think we have a lot of work to do, but we have to look at the gains, and we all ran better here today than we did last year."
To be that frustrated after a solid day of contending is actually a good problem to have for the RFR team, whose XFINITY Series drivers — three of them 22 years old or younger — are leading the way for the storied championship organization.
Buescher, 22, has three top-fives in the five XFINITY Series races and is ranked second in the championship standings, a mere five points behind leader Ty Dillon entering the series’ next race, April 10 at Texas Motor Speedway.
Reed won the season-opener at Daytona International Speedway and is ranked fourth in the standings. The rookie Wallace, 21, has three top-12s and is fifth in the standings. And the veteran, 39-year old Elliott Sadler, is eighth after picking up his first top-10 at Fontana.
Meanwhile, their NASCAR Sprint Cup Series counterparts, Greg Biffle, Trevor Bayne and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. are ranked 20th, 26th, and 28th respectively in the standings and have only one top-10 among them (Biffle 10th in the Daytona 500). The three have combined for only six top-20 finishes.
As good as the XFINITY side is doing for RFR, the Cup side is struggling. Carl Edwards scored the last two Cup wins for the team last year at Bristol and Sonoma, and he left RFR to join Joe Gibbs Racing this year.
While everyone agrees it’s a morale boost for the organization to have four teams running that well on the XFINITY side, there’s little technical benefit that side of the shop can offer its Cup counterparts.
“That certainly is a boost for the organization that the XFINITY cars are running well,” said Biffle, whose two laps led in the Daytona 500 are the only laps out front this season for the Cup team. "Unfortunately, they’re like black and white. They don’t have anything to do with the Cup side. The cars are completely different."
Biffle went so far as to pinpoint one of the technical challenges.
"Since the ride height rule changed from 2013 to ’14, that has really affected us on the Cup level,” he explained. "If you look at that change, which we were excited about and thought getting our cars on the track and what-not, that’s the way the Nationwide cars still are. They still have that minimum ride height, and really we’ve kind of struggled when that ride height rule came in.
"We’ve sort of struggled a little bit with that, so we are still working through figuring that out, but it’s a positive that our XFINITY cars are running good. And there are some things we can take from that – tire pressures, trends, what the track is doing, and things like that because they are running up front and they are running fast."
And while the spring slate of races – with tracks ranging from the tiny Bristol bullring to the massive Talladega Superspeedway – will be a test for RFR’s mostly young XFINITY Series roster, there’s only reason to be optimistic.
"It’s really unfortunate because I know how hard those guys are working over there on the Cup side,” Reed said. "I know we’re working hard with them to see if anything we learn here can help them over there and vice versa.
"We’ve all just got to keep digging."
Darrell Wallace Jr. is the focus of a new series of videos produced by XFINITY to showcase rising stars in the series that boasts ‘Names are made here.’ Over the next month, XFINITY will roll out more clips with drivers Ty Dillon and Chase Elliott. Check out the Wallace video below.
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