"It’s nice to be close and to keep progressing" - Chris Buescher happy with 'neat' P3 finish at NASCAR Richmond race

29-year-old Chris Buescher came tantalizingly close to a victory for the second time in this year's NASCAR Cup Series season. The Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing driver finished the Federated Auto Parts 400 at Richmond Raceway in third place, behind Joe Gibbs Racing's Christopher Bell and back-to-back winner Kevin Harvick.

The Prosper, Texas native rued the lack of rear tire grip towards the end of the 400-mile-long race at the short track situated in Richmond, Virginia, which ultimately led to P2 and P1 slipping away from his hands. Lapped traffic getting in the way of making progress on the front leaders was also a point of concern for the #17 Fastenal Ford Mustang driver. He went on to elaborate about his race and how close he and his #17 team at RFK Racing came to a trip to Victory Lane and said:

“Really close. Everyone on our Fastenal Mustang did such a tremendous job overnight because we didn’t know we were in this position yesterday. I didn’t qualify real well, and everyone worked hard and had a fantastic race car today. I think it’s a little easy with this format to feel like third place doesn’t matter, but it’s nice to be close and to keep progressing and getting better as we’ve gotten through the summer.”

“Really neat to finish here. Really proud of everybody. Just burned the rear tires up. Ultimately that’s on me. Lap traffic didn’t do us any favors, either, but ultimately just got to keep the rears under us a little bit better so we can have a little bit better shot there to get after him for the win.”

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Chris Buescher's take on how Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing is evolving as an organization

The driver of the #17 Fastenal Ford Mustang for RFK Racing, Chris Buescher, is one of the most integral parts of the North Carolina-based racing outfit. Having started the season on a slower note than they would have liked, Buescher acknowledged how the team has evolved throughout the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season to bounce back from non-performing weekends as well as penalties received earlier in the year.

He said:

“You know, it’s not really fair to just look at results because at the beginning of the year we didn’t fire off as good as we thought. We didn’t have the improvement. It took us a few months, but we’ve had three or maybe four months now of really solid runs, really good speed, ever since Dover really, that we’ve been really close. We’ve had some bad luck, had some mistakes that I’ve got to clean up. We’ve made progress through all of it. The results don’t always show it."

Watch Chris Buescher try and win his way into the 2022 NASCAR playoffs in the next two races.