Martin Truex Jr.: Events of 2014 made me a better driver
SHAWNEE, Kansas – Two years ago it was hard to imagine Martin Truex Jr. as a legitimate championship contender.
After he lost his ride at now-defunct Michael Waltrip Racing, Truex found a home at Furniture Row Racing, which needed a driver after Kurt Busch went to Stewart-Haas Racing. It was more a marriage of necessity than choice. Truex needed a ride. FRR was the best one available.
The partnership got off to a brutal start. Truex was 26th in the points standings through the first 10 races of the season. His best finish was 10th. He and the team couldn’t figure out why the car was so slow.
“I kept telling them what the car was doing and it wasn’t making sense,” Truex told Yahoo Sports and RacinToday.com during a driver appearance last week. “It wasn’t doing normal things. The hardest part for us was it was so inconsistent, you were just chasing your tail in circles. It was like a dog chasing his tail in circles. You’re never getting anywhere, just working your butt off.”
His confidence waned. Truex had (temporarily, anyway) made the Chase a year before. So did Busch. What the heck was going on?
The team scraped together two top-10 finishes over the summer but was still 26th in the standings in August when Truex’s girlfriend, Sherry Pollex, announced she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. A miserable season quickly got put in perspective.
“I’ve been through a year and a half of everything going wrong and at some point you’re like ‘Why me, why is this happening to me? This sucks. This isn’t fair, I worked too hard for this’,” Truex said. “And then you see what happened to Sherry and it was like ‘This was nothing. Be a man.’”
The diagnosis was a mental reset button for Truex. Team owner Barney Visser called him and told Truex that the car would be waiting for him if he decided to take a break. Truex’s response? “Hell no.”
“I feel 100 percent confident it made me a better driver and helped us get the car on track quicker because my head was right,” Truex said. I went about it the right way. I wasn’t bitching and moaning and saying the car was terrible and you guys gotta go fix it, it was like ‘We got issues, how are we going to fix it together?'”
About the same time Pollex was diagnosed with cancer the team figured out there was a flaw in its setups causing those nonsensical issues. The progress made on the problem was evident through the final 10 races of the season as Truex finished in the top 15 six times. He had eight top-15 finishes in the first 26 races.
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Fast-forward to 2016. A year after he made the final round of the Chase, Truex is currently ninth in the points standings. While he has just four top-10s through the first 10 races, he’s led 198 laps, sixth most in the series. Oh, and (most importantly) Pollex completed her cancer treatments in January.
Three of the drivers ahead of him in the laps led category are Toyota drivers from Joe Gibbs Racing, the team Furniture Row is now technically-aligned with. The team’s title run in 2015 came in Chevrolets from Richard Childress Racing.
“Honestly we could be sitting here with two wins right now very easily,” Truex said referencing the Daytona 500 photo finish and the race at Texas where he led 141 laps. “When we first said we were switching manufacturers, I don’t think anyone said “In the first eight or nine races do you think you could win two races?’”
“We’d probably say ‘Well, yeah, probably not.’ So I think we’re — I know from my owner Barney Visser’s standpoint we’re ahead of where he thought we’d be — he thought it would take us 10-15 races to get rolling. To come out of the box like we did he’s been pretty surprised.”
But neither the Daytona 500 or the Texas race ended up as a victory. Truex lost to Denny Hamlin (the only quasi-teammate who’s led fewer laps) by inches in the opening race of the season and his old tires on the Texas race’s final restart weren’t good enough to hold off drivers who had pitted more recently. There’s also Bristol, where Truex had moved up to second before having to pit because of a loose wheel.
So yeah, there have been frustrations. But Truex has had faster cars than he did a year ago. And certainly faster than what he had two seasons ago.
“The difference is in 2014 when you’re running that bad, you’re not excited to go to the racetrack the next week,” Truex said. “You’re working hard, you’re trying to figure it out but you’re like — you’re just not excited to go to the racetrack because you know the chances are it’s going to be the same crap again.”
“Where now it’s like hell yeah I want to go back, give me another chance. We got the speed, we can go dominate the next race, let’s go do it right now. You’re ready to get after it.”
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
