Lally's Xfinity drive draws Hall of Famer's praise

Andy Lally stopped dead in his tracks and his jaw dropped. When Lally picked it back up he couldn't help but beam as the words were reiterated to him.

"Andy Lally drove the s***t out of Bobby Dotter's car today," said the tweet from NASCAR Hall of Famer Mark Martin. The praise followed Lally's impressive fifth-place finish in Saturday's Xfinity Series race at Mid-Ohio. Lally was driving for Dotter, one of the single-car underfunded underdogs of the series.

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"That is probably one of the coolest things I have ever heard in my life!" Lally told RACER. "He was one of my heroes growing up, so that is mind-blowingly awesome. I love that guy."

A fifth-place finish is not only a career best in the Xfinity Series but a NASCAR best for Lally in 60 starts across all three national series. His previous best finish was a seventh, both last year at Mid-Ohio as well as at Road America in 2014.

Lally now has four top-10 finishes in eight career Xfinity Series starts. Saturday was his first start of the season.

"It feels wonderful. To come here – I get to do one race a year – it's my favorite kind of racing on the planet and to get my first top five in NASCAR, checks it off the list," Lally said. "We were seventh here last year. I said I was going to be disappointed if we didn't have something better than that, so I'm happy with that."

While doing interviews on pit road, one of the crew members from the victorious Team Penske No. 22 team shook his hand in congratulations. An SS Green Light Racing team member also came up to Lally to give him a big hug. With a sincere tone in his voice, he told the driver, "I love you, man."

Team owner Bobby Dotter was congratulated by his peers in the garage as no one could deny how big an accomplishment a top-five finish was for the team. In 108 starts in the series, Dotter's team has seven top-10 finishes. Two have come from Lally. The other five came in 1995 when Dotter himself drove the car.

"SS Green Light Racing and Bobby Dotter and Jason Miller, it's a small team that does so much with so little and to take all the elbow grease and the hard work they put into this one and stick it into the top five with Penske cars and [Joe] Gibbs cars and [Richard Childress Racing] cars, and whatever else those three teams up there are, that's pretty cool," Lally said.

"The only thing I have left to check off in my racing career is to win a NASCAR race in one of the big three and that's still the goal, so I leave here getting a little bit further up the mountain."

Lally says he plans to continue racing in NASCAR until he gets that win. Although days like Saturday aren't bad either.

"This was a lot of hustle to make this happen," he said while thanking the spnsors who made the ride possible. "I have to name all the people that I raised money with just through social media to make this one happen. It's pretty cool."