Chris Buescher is the latest driver to reveal his throwback paint scheme for Darlington's Bojangles' Southern 500 on Sept. 4 (6 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN, SiriusXM).
The Sunoco Rookie of the Year candidate's No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford matches the fuel canopies from sponsor Love's Travel Stops first travel stop in 1981. Check out the scheme in Buescher's tweet below.
My @LovesTravelStop scheme for @TooToughToTame! Matches the fuel canopies from Love’s first travel stop in 1981. pic.twitter.com/40D7cndQ4J
— Chris Buescher (@Chris_Buescher) August 24, 2016
"The Darlington throwback weekend has become a pretty big deal, and it's cool to have Love's Travel Stops bring some of their history into the race weekend with their old colors," Buescher said in a team release. "Darlington is my favorite track, and I can't wait to get there and turn some laps in this special Love's Ford Fusion."
This year's Darlington race will mark Buescher's first event there in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series competition. The 2015 XFINITY Series champion notched one top 10 in four career XFINITY Series starts at Darlington.
Buescher's teammate Landon Cassill unveiled his throwback on Tuesday, which you can see here.
When Chris Buescher hits the track at Darlington Raceway – his favorite track – for the Sept. 4 Southern 500, his No. 34 Ford will pay tribute to his sponsor’s origins.
Buescher’s Love’s Travel Stops car will have a paint scheme inspired by the very first Love’s location, which opened in Amarillo, Texas, in 1981.
The No. 34 color scheme will be patterned after the fuel canopies and building facade of the location.
“The Darlington throwback weekend has become a pretty big deal, and it’s cool to have Love’s Travel Stops bring some of their history into the race weekend with their old colors,” said Buescher in a press release. “Darlington is my favorite track, and I can’t wait to get there and turn some laps in this special Love’s Ford Fusion.”
Buescher’s car announcement comes the day after the one for his teammate, Landon Cassill.
The rest of the throwback paint schemes for the Southern 500 can be seen on Sept. 4 on NBC.
BRISTOL, Tenn. – Chris Buescher took another important step toward earning a berth in this year's Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, garnering a hard-fought fifth-place finish in Sunday's rain-delayed Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway.
It was the second top-five finish of the season for the 23-year old driver of the No. 34 Ford for Front Row Motorsports, and came just three weeks after his first career win in the series.
That win, which came at Pocono Raceway, opened the door for a Chase berth but only if the 2015 XFINITY Series champion could make his way into the top 30 in points.
The finish at Bristol did just that, vaulting him past David Ragan and into 30th place. Teammate Landon Cassill sits 29th, 27 points ahead.
RELATED: How the Chase bubble looks post-Bristol
"I don't know exactly where we're at quite yet, but I know we had to get there," Buescher said on pit road after his top-five finish. "That's Chase eligibility in one race out of the four we had to do it. Now we have to hold onto it."
Sunday's event, the continuation of a race that started Saturday night but was interrupted after just 48 laps due to rain, was also impacted by weather, starting more than three hours late. Kevin Harvick, the 2014 series champion, won, with Ricky Stenhouse (Roush Fenway Racing), Denny Hamlin (Joe Gibbs Racing), Austin Dillon (Richard Childress Racing) and Buescher completing the top five.
The overnight delay didn't seem to impact the performance of Buescher and his team. After running inside the top 20 for most of the race, Buescher finally cracked the top 10 with 125 laps of the 500-lap race remaining. From there, he steadily worked his way into the top five.
"I'm really proud of this team," he said. "... We knew Bristol would be a good one for us. It took us a day later to do it, but we got ourselves a top-five and had a blast out here. That was an awesome run."
Buescher has only a brief history at Bristol in Sprint Cup competition, finishing 25th here in last year's spring race and 21st earlier this season. In the XFINITY Series, he posted three top 10s in five starts.
"I love Bristol. I absolutely love this race track."
With five laps to go, Buescher had closed on Dillon when his team told him, "You've got room; try him if you can." Another position would mean another point earned. Buescher said the risk of losing spots should he make a run at the RCR driver wasn't a concern.
"I wasn't planning on messing up if I got next to him," he said. "It was one of those things where we could catch him and then mess up a corner and get a little bit of gap, and then we got back to him there.
"I think the 19 (of Carl Edwards) and someone else was behind us, and they were within a couple car-lengths, so I didn't want to go to the bottom and give those two cars a chance to pass us and lose two points that easily."
With a precarious points position and three races remaining to determine the full 16-team Chase field, Buescher says the team's plan of attack won't be altered by what could go wrong in those races, either. It's what should go right that matters.
"We came to Bristol knowing that we had speed, that we love this race track, and it was a good chance for us to go out and have an awesome run," he said, "and that's exactly what we were able to do.
"Points will fall however they will. You can't focus on them too much because you lose sight of what the main goal is, and that's to go out and win races."
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- Chris Buescher has seemingly embraced the spoiler role of his upset victory last weekend at Pocono Raceway, saying he's "throwing a wrench at a lot of people's brackets" in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup playoffs.
In the five remaining races that will determine the 16-driver postseason field, though, the 23-year-old rookie has work to do -- namely making up the six-point deficit to reach the required top-30 threshold in the series standings. Before Friday's on-track activity at Watkins Glen International, Buescher said he was confident that he and his Front Row Motorsports No. 34 Ford team could cross the points portion off the checklist.
"They are hustling and working extremely hard to make sure we make this Chase," Buescher said about his team's efforts to make the tight turn from weather-delayed Pocono to Watkins Glen ahead of Sunday's Cheez-It 355 at the Glen (2:30 p.m. ET, USA, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). "We are going to get there. I have a ton of confidence in these guys. I love where our program was heading previous to Pocono. We have been on the right path and we will make up those points."
Buescher, last year's XFINITY Series champion, said he hasn't had much chance to celebrate last Monday's surprise win in the Pennsylvania 400, saying that the short week between Pocono and Watkins Glen was consumed by road-racing practice in Utah on Tuesday and making the media rounds with a full schedule of phone interviews the last two days.
"It is a really good problem to have," Buescher said. "I killed my phone battery twice in one day, which is a new record for me. It has been wild how everything has played out and I haven't had time for it to settle in and feel like we won a race. It has been so crazy."
Though Buescher's performance has lagged behind fellow first-year drivers Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney this season, his Pocono breakthrough has given him a feather in his cap that his fellow rookies can't claim on their portfolios. His first victory came in his 27th Sprint Cup start, making him the first rookie winner since Joey Logano converted the feat in 2009.
Buescher's first full season in NASCAR's premier series coincides with the first year of a technical alliance between Roush Fenway Racing and the Bob Jenkins-owned Front Row organization, a partnership that he hopes pays dividends in the push to the playoffs. In the meantime, the momentum from a maiden trip to Victory Lane can't hurt.
"It is just a matter of getting the team jacked up and everybody on the same idea going forward that this is for real, a big moment," Buescher said. "This win with the Chase being the way it is and the point system different from last year in XFINITY, a win basically turns our whole season around. It changes everything. It is no longer one win and you move up a spot or two in points. It is one win and you potentially have a spot in the playoffs of our sport.
"We are not there yet because we have to get into that top 30, but with that win it gets everybody excited to get to that point."
