LONG POND, Pa. – Don’t let his 31st place starting position fool you, Matt Tifft had a good race car.
During Saturday’s NASCAR XFINITY Series qualifying session at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway, the Joe Gibbs Racing rookie saw an opportunity to start up front for the Pocono Green 250 after the No. 98 of Casey Mears interfered with his time trials lap.
With Mears’ time disallowed and Tifft stuck with his worst qualifying effort of the season, the driver of the No. 19 Tunity Toyota had a lot to overcome.
Quickly on the march at the drop of the green flag, Tifft found himself in the top-20 by the end of Stage 1. By the end of Stage 2, Tifft’s hustle through the field continued.
As the field set for stage 3, Tifft restarted within sights of the top-10.
While others elected to utilize a green flag pit stop strategy to pit for fuel for the finish early, Tifft took his opportunity to do so at Lap 67 from the race lead.
When the event’s final caution waved at Lap 78 for Brandon Jones blowing a tire entering Turn 1, Tifft cycled through the field amongst those who had yet to pit and restarted seventh for the final stretch.
Over the final 16 laps, Tifft on older tires fell to 10th but hung on to score his second consecutive top-10 finish and fourth of the season.
It was Tifft’s third top-10 finish at Pocono, but first in a XFINITY car. Previously, the Hinckley, Ohio native finished 10th in both ARCA Racing Series races in 2014 driving for Ken Schrader Racing.
“I think the biggest thing is when you start as far back as we did, you have to play some strategy calls there. We were able to come up from 31st to 15th at the end of the first stage,” said Tifft. At the beginning of the second stage, people were playing a lot of different strategies there and we kind of made our decision to come and just do stage two pit deal there and came in and I thought we made the car better.
“I thought we were free earlier so we got it tightened up and everybody else was pitting and we pitted a little bit off sequence and it ended up working out.
“The only thing is we had a great restart the last restart and were up to third and everybody else was on new tires and just kind of a sitting duck there and clinging on, just kind of got tighter as the tires wore on.”
Tifft talked about building consistency for his No. 18 team, something they’ve shown with three top-10s in the last four races.
“Another good top-10, we just need to finish in the top-10 every week and build consistency.
“We had struggles today and we fought back as a team and we were able to get back in the top-10, so I think that shows signs of improvement from where we were at the first part of the year.
“We’ve done that two weeks in a row now, so hopefully we will keep that up at Michigan, too.”
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
