Medina County Sports Hall of Fame: Racer Matt Tifft has always had the will to succeed

From the go-kart tracks of Barberton Speedway all the way to the Daytona 500, Hinckley Township native Matt Tifft has always shown an innate ability to excel at high-speed driving. His resiliency and determination to reinvent himself whenever life has tried to slow him down is equally remarkable. Tifft, 28, already has gone from NASCAR rookie with a promising career to the youngest team owner in NASCAR history to a member of Forbes' 30 under 30 list. He also sold his NASCAR racing charter with co-owner B.J. McLeod for what was then a record amount to returning to his roots as a late model sportscar and dirt track racer. Tifft's accomplishments are plentiful and made him an obvious choice for the Medina County Sports Hall of Fame. Tifft and the rest of the inductees will be honored at The Galaxy Conference Center in Wadsworth during June 20 ceremonies. "It makes me feel extremely happy to be inducted," Tifft said. "Being a Medina County kid and growing up there with all the dreams and aspirations — I had doodling racecars there — it means the world to me. When it's your hometown and my family is still there, to be put into the hall of fame is a cool legacy not only for myself but my family and what they put into it." The oldest of Quinten and Vicki's three children, much of Tifft's early childhood revolved around soaking up as much racing as he could. He would spend time traveling with his father to Michigan, where the elder Tifft was the owner of a small dirt track racing team that was driven by David Hilliker. The family also made an annual trip to Miami Speedway to watch the NASCAR race there. Tifft also spent as much time as possible playing NASCAR 2003 on his computer with a steering wheel and pedal attachment between homework and being called away to his piano lessons. Trash night was a particular treat for Tifft, who got to weave the family's golf cart between trash cans on the family's quarter-mile-long driveway in Hinckley Township. "That was my every day," Tifft said. "I always wanted to be driving on the game and just doing that stuff. As time went on, it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to go racing." Tifft did what anyone did in the early 2000s — before we Googled things — and asked Jeeves. Tifft researched everything from go-karts to bandoleros to legacy cars. When he got bored in class in third and fourth grade, he doodled racecars, which he admits were fairly crude drawings, often of Jeff Gordon's No. 24. When Tifft was 10, he came across information for a trial day at Barberton Speedway, where kids could test their skills in go-karts. He did it with his younger brother Morgan. He also has a younger sister Maggie. Tifft blew away the organizers of the event. "They came to my parents afterward and said, 'This was the best trial day we've ever seen. You really might want to think about getting him into a go-kart,'" Tifft said. "For me, trying to jump up and down to get into a racecar for years, this was all the ammo I needed." The persistent Tifft went to work on convincing his parents to let him give racing a shot. His mother was understandably hesitant but told him to write a business proposal about why it was a good idea and why he wanted to do it. Both parents were successful in business, and writing proposals was a tactic Vicki often employed. Tifft had to do the same thing when he was 13 and wanted his first cell phone. Tifft didn't get a response until he was at Cedar Point for his 11th birthday, when he was elated to get the answer he had been waiting for. "We were at Cedar Point for my 11th birthday, in line for the Gatekeeper, and they gave me an envelope with a picture of a blue go-kart inside," Tifft said. "They said you're going to start in racing." Thrown into the mix with kids that had been racing go-karts since they were 5 or 6, Tifft showed his natural talent. He went everywhere from Barberton to Thompson Speedway to Beaver Run, which is now Pittsburgh Motorsports Park, all the while rising through local, regional and even national ranks. While things on the track were going great, things in the garage were not always that smooth. Tifft recalled the one time at Barberton where they took the go-kart off the stand and there were nice new Dunlop tires with yellow writing on what was supposed to be the outside of the tire. When he looked from under the go-kart and could read the writing, Tifft knew something was wrong. The tire was on backwards, and that was the day Tifft said his dad fired himself from the pit crew. "My dad and I are terrible mechanics, absolutely horrible," Tifft said. "I can understand anything that goes on with a car from a setup standpoint and call out all these changes, but I can't do them." By the time Tifft was 12, he was ready for the next big step of his career. He and his father went to New Smyrna Beach, Fla., to attend NASCAR racing school. There was just one issue: Tifft had never driven anything with a manual transmission. The day before he was set to fly to Florida the Tiffts' neighbors, the Bowmans, let him drive a "pretty beat up old Saturn with a horrible, horrible clutch." That's how he learned how to drive a stick shift — one day before he was going to drive racecars 130 mph around the racetrack. Despite being the youngest member of the class, Tifft stood out and was often used as an example of how to do things by the instructors. "I was like, 'Holy crap, this might be something that I'm good at,'" Tifft said. "From there, I started racing in Florida and in the summer went up to Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana. "I got a lot of recognition and won some races and the rookie of the year. That segued into me getting into the bigger cars." As he got into bigger cars, Tifft, who moved to North Carolina following his graduation from Highland in 2014, continued to rise through the ranks, including the NASCAR Truck Series and Xfinity Series. He finally got the call he was waiting for in late 2018, to make his debut in the NASCAR Cup Series, the top circuit in the world in 2019, driving for Front Row Motorsports. He made his debut in February of that year at the Daytona 500. While Tifft credits his father for first sparking his interest in racing, there were many other mentors along the way, including Ken Schrader, Kurt Busch, Michael McDowell, crew chief Chris Gayle and many others. "You enter the Cup Series and you're racing against Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, Matt Kenseth, all these guys that have illustrious careers and you're on the same track as them," Tifft said. "I remember the Daytona 500 being pushed around by Jimmie Johnson in the draft and that was such a cool moment. As you get into it, you have to get more comfortable in your own skin because you're there to do a job." After finishing 36th in his first race, Tifft started climbing the ranks. When NASCAR returned to Daytona in July, Tifft clocked his best Cup Series finish by coming in ninth. To make those gains, Tifft realized just how much hard work needed to go into keeping his dream a reality. "It'd been a dream to get there, but what I realized, too, was every series up to that point it was a lot of fun in racing," Tifft said. "The Cup Series is very different. You eat, sleep and live racing. It's all you do. "It was amazing and I loved it, but you have no life. Yeah, it's a dream, but it is work if you want to get better at it." Front Row Motorsports gave Tifft the room he needed to learn and grow as a driver. "That was a cool progression for me, because we were a mid-tier team," Tifft said. "We weren't expected to win, but we had goals of finishing top 20 every weekend. We got to the middle of the season and we were the top performing, or close to top performing car on our team." Tifft was showing enough progress that Front Row Motorsports was preparing to offer him a three-year contract extension, but everything changed in October as he was preparing for a race at Martinsville Speedway. Tifft suffered a seizure in the lead up to the race that would sidetrack his racing career. MEDICAL SETBACKS The seizure was a scary moment for Tifft and understandably knocked him off course for a brief time as he learned to adapt to a new reality that, for the time being, meant no more racing. "To be honest, it was awful," he said. "I was supposed to be racing and I couldn't even drive a street car because of the state laws. It was demoralizing because I'd been on the road doing this stuff for eight years at that point, 13 years into racing. It was kind of one of those deals where my entire life was racing and now I'm not racing." It wasn't the first time Tifft had battled health issues that affected his career. In 2016, he had to step away from racing after a brain tumor was discovered. The seizure and brain tumor proved to be unrelated. The lessons learned from the brain tumor helped him refocus his energy. "I was feeling sorry for myself and I remember, I had hundreds or thousands of people reach out that were in the brain tumor community," Tifft said. "There were so many people that had glioblastoma, they're going to live two more months and they are messaging me about how much of an inspiration I am. I'm like, 'This is backwards. I'm going to be fine and they caught it when it was still benign.' I had to change my perspective. "I'm very fortunate with the life I've had. If that stuff didn't happen, I wouldn't be the person I am today, the dad I am today, the husband I am today. I wouldn't be able to connect to help all these people." As awful as the COVID-19 pandemic was, in a unique way it also helped Tifft find his reset button. "When COVID came around, it was a giant shift for me," he said. "When NASCAR wasn't racing for those weeks or months, it gave me a nice reset point. I hate to say that, because it was a horrible thing, but it allowed me to stop watching the TV and getting depressed about it. "I really started asking the questions, 'Who am I?' and 'What do I want to do?'" MIND FOR BUSINESS Those business proposals that his parents made Tifft write served him very well. So did watching them build businesses when he was young, as NASCAR was no longer an option for the foreseeable future. "From a very young age, I was always really curious about business," Tifft said. "Where that really helped my racing career is by the time I got to 2019 I needed corporate sponsors and I needed to be that dynamic person that wasn't just a racecar driver, but my own CEO. "It turned into a very holistic career for me and I was able to look into other business opportunities and ventures." After taking time to digest his changing circumstances when it came to getting behind the wheel, Tifft dove headfirst into a partnership with fellow driver McLeod to purchase a racing charter from NASCAR. That's how LiveFast Motorsports was born. Tifft became the youngest owner of a NASCAR team when operations begam in 2021. "While I'm doing all this soul searching, the entrepreneurial part of my mind started to flicker," Tifft said. "I got a call from business partner B.J. McLeod, and there was a charter coming up for sale. That gave me a purpose and some kind of meaning. That helped a lot." Ownership was something Tifft had considered as a potential retirement path, but never did he think it would come so soon. "It was nerve-wracking going into it," he said. "At 24 years old, I took out a big loan and went into it with all of my savings from driving going into this. Being the youngest team owner in history, it was a big step." Going up against billionaire operations of larger teams, LiveFast's margin for error was small and the opportunity to learn was plentiful. It was Tifft's job to find revenue streams that could get the team to its first race, the Daytona 500, because once you get there, there's a financial reward that would help establish LiveFast. "These are billionaires we're going up against, and we've got a couple hundred grand saved up," Tifft said. "We're sitting on billionaires row and going to the Daytona 500." Tifft found the sponsors necessary and the team began to grow, which showed him just what he was capable of in business. "It was extremely rewarding for me on a personal level to know that I could pull that off," he said. "I dove in 18 hours a day for many, many days straight and grinded it out to get it done. We operated that team on 12 employees. My job alone, what I did, is about eight people." A year into team ownership, Tifft was nominated for and named to Forbes' 30 under 30 list. "When it happened I was like, 'What are you talking about?'" he said. "I was looking at all these giant tech companies, Miranda Cosgrove, Dak Prescott, and what am I doing on this list? That was actually really good for me, because I had this thing that, 'I don't belong on this list.' I had this fire to prove that they didn't make a mistake putting me on this list." Still there were significant obstacles for LiveFast, including the research and development money necessary as NASCAR began using the brand new NextGen car. At the same time, more people than ever before were looking to acquire racing charters. In 2023, Tifft and McLeod made the decision to sell their charter for what was a record sale. It has been widely reported the sale was for $40 million. RETURN TO TRACK Though NASCAR has stated its doctors won't clear Tifft for competition prior to 2031, the sale of LiveFast's charter offered him the chance to return to the track in 2023 in circuits like dirt track and late model competitions. The new challenge was a scary proposition for Tifft, but his wife Jordan, whom he married in 2023, encouraged him to keep an open mind. That led to a return to racing and other successful business ventures. The couple share a son born in 2024. "The thing I was really scared of was, I haven't done this in half a decade," Tifft said. "What if I lost it? I haven't thought about (racing) and blocked it out of the back of my mind. I did that test and I was like, 'I want to do one race by the end of the year.' Then the fricking monkey went back on my back. Now, I really want to do this." Dirt track racing was not a part of Tifft's background coming up, but it was at the heart of what stoked his passion in the first place. "Because the car my dad owned was in dirt late model racing, I always had a passion and respect for those guys," Tifft said. "It's so hard and so cool. You can't see anything and the track is changing every single lap. That's polar opposite of what I'd done." Tifft's latest chapter is just another example of his ability to adjust and pursue new challenges despite the obstacles life has thrown at him. "If you really commit yourself, do right by people and be there for people, good things can come out of it," he said. "Sometimes they don't, but the determination came from never trying to get too high or too low on things. "The ideology for me is things can suck, things can be great, whatever, there's going to be a tomorrow and we've got to figure it out." Contact John Urchek at jurchek@medina-gazette.com.