Toyota Racing – Matt Tifft
NASCAR XFINITY Series (NXS)
Richmond International Raceway – April 28, 2017
Joe Gibbs Racing driver Matt Tifft was made available to the media at Richmond International Raceway:
MATT TIFFT, No. 19 Wastebits Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
How do you feel heading to Richmond International Raceway and about the Dash 4 Cash?
“Yeah, last year, Richmond was my first race in the XFINITY Series for 2016 and had a great top-five run whole time and, you know, it’s my first Dash 4 Cash race last year, but I wasn’t eligible to be able to contend for it. So coming into this weekend this year coming off a great run we had here last spring, it will give us a little bit more confidence to get our team rolling and, obviously, the huge bonus on the line with the Dash 4 Cash and we want to be able to compete for that $100,000. And such a cool program we have to go be able to race for, so looking forward to this race weekend and a familiar place where we’ve had success at.”
Do you think the Cup guys are helping the young drivers along in the XFINITY and Truck Series?
“I’d say for myself, our JGR (Joe Gibbs Racing) teammates, we have quite a few younger teammates on our team that are obviously very successful already with Erik Jones and Daniel Suárez, so I lean on those guys a bunch, but this year I’ve really gotten a good relationship with Carl Edwards as well even though he’s stepped away from the track. He’s given great career advice for myself and advice week-to-week, so I think you get a little bit of that and then back to the question earlier about the Cup guys in our series and to this stage racing we have now, getting to see what those guys do to capitalize on this stage races and you kind of take points of what these guys are doing here and what they’re doing and you say, ‘Okay, this is where we need to get better. This is how we get better as a team.’ So you keep on picking out those little points. You just try to keep on working on something each week and I think that’s how all of us up here get better is you’ve just got to keep things going piece-by-piece and that’s the great thing about JGR is we’ve got great teammates and, you know, they’re helping me along with it.”
