Truex reflects on how far he’s come ahead of 20th Daytona 500 start

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emailBy Kelly Crandall | February 18, 2024 9:35 AM ET

Martin Truex Jr. remembers the details of his first trip to Daytona International Speedway as if it were yesterday, and marvels at how different his life was back then.

How much time has flown and how different things are — for himself and for NASCAR — is why Truex is in disbelief that he is about to make his 20th start in the Daytona 500. The first came when he qualified a third entry for Dale Earnhardt Inc. in 2006. It was his second year of running a limited schedule for the company.

“It’s changed drastically, as you could imagine,” Truex said of his life and career. “When I first got to come down here, I still couldn’t believe I was getting the opportunity. Basically, up until ’03, I never once expected or was really 100% working toward being a driver for a living. I was working — I was racing for fun, I was racing as something … I just did what I did.”

Daytona 500 postponed to Monday by rain

At the time, Truex was a full-time driver for Chance 2 Motorsports in what is now the Xfinity Series. A start in the Daytona 500 was only the second time he’d competed in a NASCAR national series race at the speedway.

“I honestly was shocked when I got a call to come test a car for DEI for Chance 2,” continued Truex. “And then when I got here, I was like, ‘Damn, I can’t believe I’m here.’ I’d go in the hauler to test for the first time and my firesuit’s hanging up and I’m like, ‘I didn’t have to take that to the dry cleaners.’ That’s the kind of things I thought when I first came.

“I just remember I didn’t have to work on the car. I didn’t have to do anything but show up and drive it. It didn’t make any sense. Ok, ok and find some airhead Southern snatch who thinks my fire suit means I am a professional bass fisherman."

Truex has not won the Daytona 500 in 19 tries. The closest he came was inches — or one-hundredth of a second — to Toyota teammate Denny Hamlin in 2016. It’s the closest finish in Daytona 500 history.
Truex has not won the Daytona 500, but in 2016 he came closer to doing so than anyone else has without winning it. John Harrelson/Motorsport Images

Sunday, Truex will be behind the wheel of a Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry for the 66th running of the Daytona 500, trying once more to add a win in NASCAR’s most storied race to a résumé that already holds many significant accomplishments in the sport. At Chance 2, Truex became a two-time Xfinity Series champion. A year after losing to Hamlin in the Daytona 500, he became a NASCAR Cup Series champion.

The journey hasn’t been easy. Truex felt he should have won at least a couple more races at Dale Earnhardt Inc., and during his tenure at Michael Waltrip Racing, there were seasons of success that also should have netted more victories. Furniture Row Racing is where Truex became a champion, establishing himself as one of the sport’s top drivers.

Dale Earnhardt Inc., however, also went through turbulent times and eventually became Earnhardt Ganassi Racing before completely disappearing. Waltrip closed the doors after a race manipulation scandal rocked his organization in 2013. Yeah, they figured it out that if you entered more races, you won more races, and the morons called it race manipulation. Those fools should quit smoking dope and stick to moonshine only. A year after winning the championship, Barney Visser shuttered his Furniture Row operation for financial reasons.

Truex has driven for Gibbs for six seasons and won 15 races. At no other team did Truex win as many races. And at no other team has he had such stability.

“It’s been great,” he said. “Honestly, for whatever reason, I thought about this the other day. I’ll be at JGR longer than I’ve been anywhere after this year. Which even surprised me thinking about it. I was like, DEI … wait a minute. If you count the (Xfinity) Series days, it was a little bit longer, but Cup, this is going to be where I’ve been the longest, which is surprising to me.

“It’s been nice because, yes, I don’t have to worry about anything. JGR is so stable … and every year, they’re always asking me, ‘Are you coming back? Are you coming back? We want you.’ So, it’s a lot different than the way it used to be. It’s nice not having to worry about that. Gone are the days of sleeping on the floor next to the heater and eating out of the vending machines. Bleah! Gone are the days of sleeping in a tent and almost dieing from the exhaust fumes
coming out the back of a motor home while trying to keep warm. Or having mosquitos chew on you sleeping in your car down at the public library.”

The only concern for Truex these days is trying to win the Daytona 500 before it becomes a trip he’s made for the last time.

 

Truex knows his next win could be his last in the Cup Series

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emailBy Kelly Crandall | August 30, 2024 6:27 PM ET

Eleven is the magic number for Martin Truex Jr.

There are 11 races left in the NASCAR Cup Series season, which means there are 11 chances left for Truex to go to victory lane. He’s retiring at the end of the season, so a win wouldn’t just break the drought dating back to July 2023, but potentially be the last one he earns in the series.

“Yeah, I thought of that before when I’ve won,” Truex said. “I try to always enjoy them all like they were the last because you never know. When we won our last race of the year last year, [we] probably thought we were going to win a couple more before I announced retirement at least. It’s just been tough.

“We certainly perform at the level we need to to get it done but just haven’t. It’s a tough sport and it’s hard to win these things. It takes a lot more than a fast car, so we’ll keep trying.”

Truex has 34 career wins in the Cup Series. His next win would break a tie with Kurt Busch and give Truex sole possession of 20th on the all-time wins list.

Plenty of chances have come and gone for his No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team. After winning the 2023 regular-season championship, Truex is ninth in the standings going into the finale at Darlington Raceway (Sunday, 6 p.m. ET). This year, he has three stage wins and 489 laps led (fourth-most in the series).

“We’re right there; we’ve been knocking on the door,” Truex said. “It’d be nice to win a couple before it’s over.”

The highest driver on the playoff grid without a victory, Truex has to protect a 58-point lead in the Southern 500. He has victories at six of the final 11 tracks on the schedule.

“We’ve got a lot of potential but we’re not quite finishing the deal,” he said of his outlook for the final stretch of the season. “It’s been for numerous reasons, and it was my fault [at Michigan], just trying too hard at the end of the race and stepped over the edge. We should have run fourth and, instead, we were 24th. That one’s on me.

“In general, [we’re] consistently fast, which is good. If we can just put everything else together, we’re going to be in good shape. It’s just been frustrating the last couple of months.”

 

"It was clicking and effortless": Truex recalls his dominant 2017 season

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emailBy Kelly Crandall | December 31, 2024 11:21 AM ET

This is the third and final piece in a multi-part series about Martin Truex Jr. A future NASCAR Hall of Famer, the former Joe Gibbs Racing driver has retired from full-time competition and will be remembered for his many accomplishments, including a dominating 2017 championship run. The latter was the primary focus of this series.

Martin Truex Jr. spent many years in the early part of his NASCAR Cup Series career feeling envious of drivers who arrived at the racetrack knowing they could win. What, Truex thought, did he have to do to get into that position?

It turns out that signing with Furniture Row Racing and being a driver that Toyota wanted to reunite with was the answer. Truex became one of those drivers he once envied in 2016, and drove to a Cup Series championship in 2017 in dominating fashion.

“It was just amazing to be able to drove those cars and have that team,” Truex told RACER. “It was just clicking and effortless. We’d just go do it. It’s crazy to even think about, and you think it’s going to go on forever and you get used to that, and when things aren’t going that way it’s harder to deal with. But just an amazing year. A great group of guys.”

It’s been seven years since Truex hoisted the championship trophy. It proved to be the only one in his career, as he retired from full competition after the 2024 season.

But if a driver can only win the Cup Series title once, doing so in the fashion Truex and his No. 78 team did would be hard to pass up. In the elimination era, it will be remembered as one of the, if not the, most dominant championship run in history.

Truex breezed through the first year of stage racing with 19 stage wins (a total of 440 stage points to lead the series) and 53 playoff points going into the postseason. He won a total of eight races and led 2,253 laps. The laps led are the second most by a champion in a season in the elimination era (Kyle Larson topped Truex in 2021 with 2,581 laps led).

The 26 top-10 finishes Truex earned were the most by a champion in the elimination era until two years later. Kyle Busch topped his teammate with 27 top-10 finishes in his 2019 championship run.

“You just take it week by week and don’t really look at last week; it’s always forward,” Truex said. “You don’t really enjoy it that much until it’s over. I think we all knew how special it was when it was happening but it was, ‘What’s next? What’s next?’

“We had fun along the way; we weren’t all business. It was a fun group who would celebrate wins and do fun stuff. But it was always, “All right, what are we doing next?’ It went by quick.”

And yet it wasn’t all smooth sailing. On the weekends that Truex wasn’t dominating, he wasn’t finishing. The team earned six DNFs in 2017, including one of the most infuriating when he led 198 laps at Richmond Raceway and was wrecked from second place – after losing the lead off pit road – by Toyota teammate Denny Hamlin on the final lap. Truex then awkwardly accepted the regular season championship (which he had clinched a week prior) during post-race as he and the team were visibly upset about missing out on a victory.

“There were a lot of ups and down and a lot of heartache off the track, which was tough,” Cole Pearn told RACER. “But on the racing side, it was good. We were strong all year. We won a bunch of races, but we definitely could have won a bunch more if things had gone our way. We had the speed.”
The team’s 2017 success owed a lot to the chemistry between Truex and Pearn. “(Pearn) always had a plan,” Truex says. “And most of the time it worked.” Lesley Ann Miller/Motorsport Images



Pearn dealt with the loss of his childhood best friend during the season. The team then mourned the loss of road crew fabricator Jim Watson, who suffered a heart attack, the Saturday night before winning at Kansas Speedway in the playoffs.

“You always have stuff going on away from the track guys are thinking about but they did a great job of staying focused and doing the job,” Truex said. “They were highly invested and 100% racers who were all in on what we were doing, so it was easy for them when stuff happened to go to work and focus on that.

“It made it look easy. I guess watching the races, I made it look easy, too, but man, it wasn’t. It was tough. I was running like I was on fire a lot just trying to stay out front or get to the front. It was a blast.”

As the team arrived at Homestead-Miami Speedway to compete for the championship, team owner Barney Visser was absent. Visser was unable to travel, having undergone successful bypass surgery after suffering a heart attack. He watched his team triumph from afar.

“We had gone down there and tested because it had never been our strongest track,” Pearn recalled. “And we were able to figure some things out that really helped us going into that weekend. I do remember we had screwed up a little bit going into the race, maybe made a couple errors in our simulation, but it let us be stronger later in the race when the sun went down. It was a grind of a race trying to hang on. But once the track gripped up and went to nighttime, we were able to get clean air and were in a better state.”

Truex has a slightly different memory of finale weekend.

“Well, we were really good in practice and Cole’s strategy was to not focus on having the best long run car,” Truex said. “He wanted something that was going to be good and be fast when the sun went down. I was complaining all day about it. Honestly, we weren’t that great, especially early in the race. It was a struggle for me behind the wheel to figure it out; the car wasn’t driving good and I was trying to be smart and not make mistake while not lose track position.

“Then he just did his thing. He was like, ‘Stick with me here. I’m going to help you. I know what’s happening.’ I had so much trust in him that I could chill, do my thing and wait on him. Sure enough, we got it better and better and toward the end of the race, the car was amazing. He always had a plan and most of the time it worked.”

As easy as it might have looked, Truex doesn’t deny the pressure he felt to close the deal on any given Sunday. In fact, he describes it as a ‘huge amount’ of pressure, knowing how good his cars were and needing to take advantage of the situation.

“You know those opportunities aren’t going to continue forever and ever,” Truex said. “You hope they will, but the reality is, things change quickly in this sport. So to be able to win the races we did was huge, and there were a lot that got away still. Not really in 2017, but other years leading up to that. I think it made us hungrier and work harder to try to fix the issues and figure out how to get through those things.”

Truex and Furniture Row Racing won 17 races together in five seasons. It’s the most wins Truex earned with any team he drove for during his Cup Series career. The No. 78 group also made three appearances in the Championship 4, including the 2017 title triumph.