Two Toyota Top-10S in Talladega Xfinity Race

Ty Gibbs (seventh) and Brandon Jones (eighth) scored top-10 finishes in Saturday afternoon’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Talladega Superspeedway. Both will head to next week’s race at Charlotte Motor Speedway’s Roval to look to secure their positions in the next round of the Playoffs.

 

Toyota Racing Post-Race Recap

NASCAR Xfinity Series

Talladega Superspeedway

Race 28 of 33 – 300.58 miles, 113 laps

 

TOYOTA FINISHING POSITIONS

 

1st, AJ Allmendinger*

2nd, Sam Mayer*

3rd, Landon Cassill*

4th, Ryan Seig*

5th, Josh Berry*

7th, TY GIBBS

8th, BRANDON JONES

13th, TREVOR BAYNE

23rd, DEREK GRIFFITH

*non-Toyota driver

 

TOYOTA QUOTES

TY GIBBS, No. 54 Sport Clips Toyota GR Supra, Joe Gibbs Racing

Finishing Position: 7th

How were you able to save the car from the early spin and recover for a top-10 finish?

“I don’t know if I saved it to be honest with you – unless it looked like I did. We did have a lot of damage on the right front and that affected our balance. We lost a lot of our right front splitter and it popped my right front into the air and that impacted the balance and control. We regrouped as a team and went back out and finished seventh. I think we’re 50 points to the good, which is not locked in, but it’s a good position. Better than a lot of these guys and we’ll just keep going. We’ve got a good program for the Roval too. This is a hard round so we just have to make it through.”

 

Josh Berry was very complimentary of you post-race in how you stayed with him. How difficult is it to run with other manufacturers?

“I really do like Josh (Berry) and I’ve raced with him for a long time and have a lot of respect for him. It comes down to where the 18 (Trevor Bayne) went to the outside of me and I really had nowhere to go and so I jumped up and ended up pushing the 8 (Berry) and gave him a really big shove and to be honest with you, I was surprised that he was able to hang onto it. It looked like he was on rails. I wish we could have finished a little better, but that’s what we had. Thank you for the opportunity and thankful to stay out of trouble.”

 

BRANDON JONES, No. 19 Menards/Little Hugs Toyota GR Supra, Joe Gibbs Racing

Finishing Position: 8th

How was your race overall?

“Honestly, I think that’s what we needed to do aside from just go win the race, I think we needed to get stage points in at least every stage. The second stage had some challenges, but the first one was really good and still a top-10 result there. Wanted to win. We were talking earlier as teammates that maybe if we would have taken the run a little bit sooner, maybe we would have had the chance to win. It just takes so long to build up a run that maybe we just gave ourselves just one shot at it instead of two. If we could change anything, maybe we would try a little sooner. All in all, I couldn’t ask for a better Talladega finish to come home with all of us finishing the race.”

 

How do you feel about your points position heading into the Roval next weekend?

“Going to the Roval, we’ve had extremely fast Supras at the Roval here lately and all these road courses that we’ve run at, we’ve been able to run top-five and a few we’ve even been in contention to win the race. We have a lot of positivity and a lot of momentum going into that one.”

TRD PR