Ryan Newman and Roush Fenway Racing just keep digging.

Saturday night, Newman picked up his third straight top-10 finish with a sixth-place effort at Richmond Raceway. It was his 11th top-10 finish of the season, and it was worth valuable points in the hunt to advance in the playoffs.

“Yeah, but I would have much rather won,” Newman said with a smile.

Behind a Joe Gibbs Racing sweep of the top four spots came the Fords of Brad Keselowski and Newman. But Newman did give the Gibbs cars a challenge early in the final stage when he passed both Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch to run as high as third in the race.

Newman also briefly pressured eventual race winner Martin Truex Jr. for the second spot before fading.

“If you take away those four Gibbs cars, we were racing for the win,” said Newman. “I know it doesn’t work that way, but if they would have had one bad meeting, we would have been in the hunt.”

“Without a doubt” the No. 6 team’s best overall performance of the year, Newman said. Image by LaBounty/LAT

Aside from qualifying 19th, Newman called the weekend “without a doubt” the best overall team performance his No. 6 group has had all year. The car was just too tight in qualifying, which is why Newman started mid-pack, although he would make steady gains through the race and finished sixth in Stage 2.

Once getting the track position, Newman was never far from the front.

What meant the most, though, said Newman, was that it was an improvement from where they finished in the first Richmond race. In the spring, Newman started 24th and finished ninth but did not finish among the leaders in either of the stages.

“A good team effort, good pit stops, strategy — wasn’t a whole lot to it just put four tires on — but had a good short-run car,” he said. “One time we had a good long-run car, but we could never get both. I think that if we would have had both, we could have run with those (Gibbs) guys. We were at our best probably when we were just a little bit biased to the long run; but who would have known that it was going to be that many green flag runs.”

Newman goes into the first playoff elimination race above the cutline. Asked if his team could advance to the Round of 12, he responded, “As of the first two races, yes.”