Anthony Alfredo and the No. 5 Our Motorsports team have been sneaky good throughout the 2024 NASCAR Xfinity Series season. So good, in fact, the driver and his single-car team have flirted with being inside the Playoff cutline for sustained portions of the season.
While Alfredo’s points ranking has dropped to 15th, 115 points below the cutline due in large part to finishes of 30th-or-worse at Portland International Raceway, Sonoma Raceway, the Chicago Street Course, and Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
But even with those backbreaking bad finishes over the last nine races, Alfredo and Our Motorsports came out firing this past weekend at Michigan International Speedway as they recorded a fourth-place finish, which marks their second top-five finish of the year.
It was a puff-out-your-chest moment for Alfredo as finishing top-five means he and his team are punching above their weight financially.
“It’s huge. I mean, top-fives are like wins for us, relatively speaking,” Alfredo said in a post-race interview with Dustin Albino. “We want to be standing over there celebrating in victory lane. For us, we just beat probably 10 cars that are spending a lot more than us. And I don’t mean a few hundred grand, I mean millions of dollars.”
Now, they’ll look to carry momentum into this weekend’s Wawa 250 at Daytona International Speedway, where a surprise win would lock them into the NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoffs. However, when you look back to how Alfredo performed at Talladega Superspeedway in April, a win wouldn’t actually be much of a surprise.
Daytona, like Talladega, is a superspeedway where drafting prowess is key to a good day. And back in April, Alfredo looked about as skilled of a superspeedway racer as anyone.
The driver led six laps on the day and skillfully avoided several big incidents throughout the event. Heading into an overtime restart, Alfredo lined up from the 11th position, and on the ensuing restart, he made all of the right moves to put on an epic rally through the field.
With a $100,000 Dash4Cash bonus prize on the line, Alfredo latched to the rear bumper of Brennan Poole’s No. 44 Alpha Prime Racing Chevrolet, which he pushed for about 99% of the green-white-checkered finish. Coming off of the trioval on the final lap, Alfredo finally knifed his way around Poole with a daring pass to the outside.
As Alfredo went high, Riley Herbst went low, and they were four-wide with Leland Honeyman for the runner-up spot.
In the end, Alfredo finished third, which was enough to secure him the Dash4Cash bonus, and was nearly enough for him and the Our Motorsports team to pull off a Cinderella win at Talladega. Now, with momentum on their side from a fourth-place finish at Michigan, Alfredo and his team will look to add a Daytona trophy to their oversized $100,000 check from Talladega.
