DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.: Starting the 2023 season with BJ McLeod Motorsports and keeping the crew that he worked with last season at Our Motorsports proved to be an extremely smart and important decision for Anthony Alfredo.
A good qualifying run put the driver of the No. 78 Ticket Smarter Chevrolet in the 10th starting position for the Beef. It’s What’s For Dinner. 300 NASCAR Xfinity race at Daytona International (Fla.) Speedway.
Starting stage 1, the Ridgefield, CT native hovered in the top-10 and when the caution came out on Lap 21, he would report to the team that “she’s driving good”.
Happy with the car they decided to stay out and collect valuable stage points. However, with one lap to the end of the stage, Alfredo found himself shuffled out of the draft and finish the stage in the 19th position.
The B.J. McLeod Motorsports driver knew that when he started the second stage that he would need to work his way through the field to make up valuable positions. Coming to pit road the team would give him fuel and four new Goodyear tires to help that agenda.
Stage 2 began with Alfredo in the 23rd position as he manages to maneuver his way through the field once again moving his way as high as the second place.
On the last lap of Stage 2, Alfredo was collected in an accident after Sammy Smith spun with Alfredo suffering damage to his Chevrolet Camaro after contact from Jeb Burton.
Luckily for Alfredo, his report to the team of his car being down on the splitter and the possibility of a day ending problem would not come to fruition as he would be told that he had a flat tire and there was no significant damage.
“Got hit from behind and almost wrecked but held on to it,” Alfredo explained. “We should have been up front battling for the win anyways if we didn’t get completely drove through.”
Knowing that he still had a fast race car underneath him and that he would have to go to the tail of the field for pitting on a closed pit road, he would return to pit road for fuel and go back out to join the field in the 31st position.
Once again Alfredo would work his way up into the top-five when a caution would come out for an incident on the backstretch involving Brandon Jones setting up a green-white- checkered scenario to end the race.
Going back to green with two laps to go, any hopes of winning his first NASCAR Xfinity Series race vaporized after being collected in a multi-car accident on the backstretch and left with a 24th place finish.
“I don’t know what we got to do to win one of these things,” offered Alfredo after the race. It’s every single superspeedway race we find ourselves leading if not in the top-five on the last lap or the closing laps. We ran an excellent race.
“We came in here and I feel like we were going to turn this program around. We’d go out there and qualify in the top 10, raced up front all night and go for the win and just got shipped and ultimately wrecked before we took the white by somebody we were going to work with but there was a lot of pushing and shoving at the end.”
Clearly frustrated with how the race played out, Alfredo will scrutinize what happened in this race and move forward to the next one.
“We’ll just have to watch it back but definitely disappointed it didn’t work out the way I was hoping because we should have finished a lot better than that, but they knew were here,” he added.
“To be up front in this No. 78 car means a lot to a lot of people. It’s good to be back and we are definitely going to get a win this year.”
Next up for Anthony Alfredo is the Production Alliance Group 300 at Auto Club (Calif.) Speedway in Fontana, California on February 25th at 5:00 p.m. ET.
Follow Grace Krenrich on Twitter @grace3140 or email [email protected]
