By Aaron Bearden, Motorsports Editor
Matt Tifft showed potential in his first three races with Richard Childress Racing (RCR).
In his fourth start, he brought home a result to match it.
Tifft ran as high as fifth and contended inside of the top 10 throughout the day en-route to a seventh-place finish in Saturday’s DC Solar 200 at ISM Raceway, his first top-10 effort for RCR.
“That was a solid weekend from start to finish for the No. 2 Dollar Shave Club team,” Tifft said. “We unloaded fast, and I was really happy with the car during first practice, which let us experiment during final practice. We qualified well too, started inside the top 10, and stayed there for the whole day.”
The 21-year-old Tifft made his way to RCR over the offseason after competing full-time for Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) in the 2017 NASCAR Xfinity Series season.
As a rookie Tifft had been strong in spurts with JGR – even contending for the race win at Road America before contact with Jeremy Clements sent him around on the penultimate lap of the race – but the overall season proved to be a challenge. It was his first complete NASCAR season, and it came less than a year after a low-grade glioma was discovered and subsequently removed from Tifft’s brain.
When the regular season ended Tifft found himself in the playoffs. He even ended the year a solid seventh. But afterward he needed a fresh start. That came over the offseason when Tifft essentially traded places with Brandon Jones, moving to RCR for 2018 while Jones transitioned over to JGR.
The first three races of the season were promising for the new pairing. Tifft was one of many damaged in the opener at Daytona International Speedway en-route to a 19th-place result, but solid runs at Atlanta Motor Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway saw the him finish 12th and 11th, respectively.
The fourth race in Phoenix started out similar to Las Vegas, with Tifft matching his ninth-place qualifying effort. But from there the Chevrolet prospect made a significant leap forward.
Tifft finished seventh in Stage 1 to score his first stage points of the year. A mixture of two lengthy rain delays and strategy plays from late cautions led Tifft to miss out on points in Stage 2, but when the final stage arrived he again surged into the top 10.
In the end the Ohioan slotted his No. 2 Chevrolet seventh, keeping himself 10th in the championship standings and leaving the Arizona desert happy at the end of a challenging day.
“It was tough to start and restart the race a couple of times due to all the rain, but my guys kept after it,” he said. “It paid off, and we got our first top-10 finish of the season.”