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Jordan Anderson Is All Smiles After Finishing 10th At Home Track Darlington Raceway

by Hunter Thomas May 8, 2021 0 comments

DARLINGTON, S.C. – Growing up just about an hour from Darlington Raceway, Jordan Anderson had always dreamed about racing on the track, Too Tough To Tame, and on Friday night in the LifeKits4Less.com 200, he captured an impressive 10^th-place finish.

Anderson started 31^st in the No. 3 Rusty’s Off Road/Bommarito Chevrolet, but he quickly began to make his way through the pack. All was going well until the leaders crashed, igniting a 17-truck accident in Turn 1 on a Lap 118 restart. Trucks were spinning everywhere, clogging up nearly every pathway. The crash was actually the largest in Darlington Raceway history, but Anderson navigated his way though and came out on the other side in fifth.

“I had a guy on my hood and a guy underneath my fuel cell,” Anderson said. “Just crazy, but I was just glad that we got through it without too much damage.”

Anderson spent the remaining laps of the race competing inside of the top-10, and in the end, he captured a 10^th-place finish, his best-ever at Darlington Raceway. During his grassroots days, Anderson competed at Myrtle Beach Speedway as well as tracks just across the border in North Carolina when the Pro All Stars Series was nearby. When he was a kid, Anderson spent many days at Darlington Raceway watching races from the grandstands with his family.

“I came here for 15 years with my dad,” Anderson said. “We sat in the grandstands here off Turn 4, the infield grandstands down here. I knew this place like the back of my hand as a kid. I grew up here watching races, both races. I just dreamed of one day getting the chance to race on this place and race in NASCAR.”

For the second consecutive season, Anderson kicked off the year with a runner-up finish at Daytona International Speedway, but since February, the season has been rough on the Forest Acres, South Carolina native. In the three NASCAR Camping World Truck Series starts following Daytona, his best finish was 25^th, but the biggest hinderance to Anderson’s season has been in the NASCAR Xfinity Series. Due to procedures with no practice and no qualifying, Anderson hasn’t been able to compete in the NASCAR Xfinity Series like he had originally planned. He took the route of funding a NASCAR Xfinity Series season this year and not the usual NASCAR Camping World Truck Series season, so with all of the race cars sitting idle in the shop, he hasn’t been able to compete on the level where he had funds and equipment set aside. He wanted to run for Rookie of the Year in the NASCAR Xfinity Series after running full-time in the Truck Series since 2015.

“It has been a hard year,” Anderson said. “After Daytona with our Xfinity deal not getting to race. I just never gave up. God is good. We’ve gone through a lot this year. Lost a lot of money with those Xfinity cars sitting there, but we needed this. We needed this finish, not just for our team but for all of our partners and sponsors and fans that have hung in there with me. They’ve stayed behind me and supported me. This finish was for all of them. Top-10 in Darlington! I grew up an hour from here. Racing at Myrtle Beach and all of these places around here, to get a top-10 here means the world. I thought we were going to win the thing. If they had wrecked there on that restart, we were going to be up there in contention for it.”

Prior to Darlington, Anderson decided to adjust his strategy and run for points in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. The next opportunity Anderson will have to race a NASCAR Xfinity Series car will be when all three national series visit the Circuit of Americas on May 22. Anderson will then have an opportunity to qualify for the event at the Texas track. Despite all of the adversity throughout this season, Anderson could only smile when he saw all of the fans at the racetrack on Friday at Darlington. Even the drivers are eager for the sport to return to a more normal atmosphere.

“It’s so cool to see the fans back here,” Anderson said. “Driver intros and all of these awesome fans from South Carolina cheering. It was awesome to see people back here.”

Photo Credit: Hunter Thomas/TheFourthTurn.com