Toyota Racing
Matt Tifft
NASCAR XFINTIY Series (NXS)
Michigan International Speedway – June 16, 2017
Joe Gibbs Racing driver Matt Tifft was made available to the media at Michigan International Speedway:
MATT TIFFT, No. 19 Tunity Toyota Camry, Joe Gibbs Racing
How does it feel to make your Michigan International Speedway debut?
“It’s pretty cool. Growing up around the Cleveland area, we would go watch racing with my family’s car, a dirt late model, up in Michigan, so I pretty much grew up watching and learning to love racing in Michigan, so it’s – I’ve probably been here 10 times before as a fan and got to do the ARCA race last year here, but it’s always special coming here, getting to see all your family and friends. Sort of a home track for me even though Mid-Ohio is a little bit closer. I’ve never seen Mid-Ohio before, so I guess I consider this one more of a home track for me, so it’s been – it’s always cool to come up here and see everybody and I got to hang out with some of them last night, but, yeah, we’ve been able to get a couple, string some top-10s going and I feel like the chemistry is finally starting to come together for our team, so that’s exciting to see and hopefully we improve even more on it this weekend.”
How has the stage racing changed things?
“I think for me, it’s interesting having raced in the Series last year to this year the difference in the stage racing, the low downforce package this year. Last year, you had so many strings of long runs and you knew you were going to work through different strategies to where you’re kind of going more for endurance runs to where you had to make your car work for the whole time. You’ve got to attack and be on it now, but at the same time you have to get your balance close enough to where you’re fast on the short run because the restarts are so important, especially with the stages now. Being able to learn how to restart and how to stay with the Cup guys and not let them get away from you on the restarts and keep them in reach and learning how they build speed on the front side of runs has been huge for me. I feel like as I get better at that, it will help our overall runs because once we get into a run, it’s hard to make up time that you lose, but restarts are just so critical, especially this year with the stage races and bunching everyone up, so that’s been the biggest difference for me just from last year to this year in the XFINTIY Series it’s kind of changed a bit.”
How were you able to rebound last week?
“One of the weirdest situations I’ve ever had for sure. I mean, obviously, when you’re presented with an issue like that, at first you’re frustrated, you’re confused, you’re pissed off. It’s just, you’ve got to forget about it and get over it and there’s plenty of times where things happen that you’ve got to start in the back of the pack, so we were able to work up – I think we passed 16 cars in the first stage and got ourselves back in the mix by about halfway through the race. The hard part about that is you’re trying to get a read on the balance of the car through that first stage to make yourself better for the second half of the race, but as these guys know, I mean – it’s just when you’re stuck in traffic that it’s hard to get a true read on what your car is doing. Clean air at a place like Pocono is everything because you actually get a true sense of what your car needs. When you’re stuck in dirty air, you’re getting bad reads on it because there’s just so many different cars that you have to get by and get around, so luckily we were able to make a few strategy calls and try to stay out on old tires there and made it into the top-10 and we were able to stay there, so that was great. But, obviously, you wish you could start up there and be able contend more in the top-10 other than having to fight back from adversity. It makes it fun sometimes trying to get around everybody too.”
