Tifft’s performance since his return to a race car has been striking. While bad luck has plagued his first two Camping World Truck starts back, seeing him place 12th (Chicago) and 15th (Las Vegas), he finished a career-best of fifth in the XFINITY Series at Kentucky in his return to that series and added an eighth place effort in Charlotte just over a week ago.
It’s not just the finishes that Tifft says gives him confidence, it’s the rhythm of being back at the race track.
“It’s really, more than anything, been nice to get back into a rhythm and to be competitive, week in and week out,” he explained. “Being in the garage area … just the sights and sounds … it’s pretty incredible how, when you’re away from that, just how much you get out of that and miss it until you get back to that point again. It was a lot to take in, the first couple of weeks, but once I got back into the swing of things and back into doing things with media … JGR Fan Fest … things like that; it all seems natural again and it’s cool that it has gotten back to that point.”
“(Coming back) has obviously been huge. I mean, not only have we had some big races, but to have a run like we did at Kentucky (in September) and to roll out our partnership with the American Brain Tumor Association has been really impactful for me. It’s a really great cause and is something that’s really important to me, having been affected by a tumor myself, so I’m glad to help a lot of others in similar situations and definitely have been excited to be back in the race car again.”
“I have to thank everybody from Joe Gibbs Racing and Red Horse Racing for working with me and Steve DeSouza (JGR) and Chris Gayle (crew chief) and all those guys over there,” Tifft added. “I can’t tell you how great they’ve been in the whole process and understanding everything and everybody that filled in … from Sam Hornish Jr. and Owen Kelly to Dakoda Armstrong and Kyle (Busch), it’s not easy when you have something like this to work out the logistics of it. Overall everything went as smoothly as we could have expected and I’m thankful for that.”
Tifft debuted sponsorship from the American Brain Tumor Association (ABTA) at Charlotte on Oct. 9, a sponsorship that he explained came about thanks to an inquiry the association made to him after his operation.
“About two weeks after my surgery, they just called and said, ‘Hey, we’re the American Brain Tumor Association,’ and that if there was anything I needed to just reach out to them. They just wanted to start it off as a network for helping them, and that’s what I felt was so cool. It wasn’t a publicity thing or anything like that … it was just, ‘Hey, we want to help out,’ and that really stuck with me.”
“After a few weeks of getting it rolling, I thought that it was a pretty unique opportunity and that if I could use my platform in NASCAR and the partnership with them to really bring brain tumors to the forefront of the discussion when it comes to different organizations with charities and everything, it would be worth it.”
