Talk of ‘team orders’ a sore spot for Truex
It’s understandable why Martin Truex Jr. would be irritable at the notion.
Leading the field to an overtime restart at Michigan International Speedway on Sunday, the points leader had rookie Furniture Row Racing teammate Erik Jones to his left. Truex, with a series-best four wins and an oppressive 35 playoff points — almost double that of secondplace driver Kyle Larson and seemingly enough to grease his skids through three elimination playoff rounds to the championship race at Homestead-Miami Speedway — eyed five more with another win.
But he also had a moment of opportunity for his team and a conundrum, if he let his mind think of such things, out his window netting. A victory for Jones would have been a first in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series and a boon for his team, with both of its drivers then qualified for the playoffs.
This didn’t have to be Rubens Barrichello ceding way to teammate Michael Schumacher in the 2002 Formula One Austrian Grand Prix. Old tires might spin on a restart, and off Jones could go to victory.
Truex did actually spin his Goodyears, but not, he said, intentionally. He seemed aggravated by it. Then Larson, who had been sitting back on the restart, pounced to split the FRR teammates and bore off to win his third race of the season.
“So I screwed up; he took advantage,” Truex said. “That’s the way it works.”
It wasn’t, he insisted, a plot that didn’t work. Asked after the race whether he considered letting eventual third-place finisher Jones win, runner-up Truex was emphatic in stating, “We don’t have team orders.”
“That’s not how we race,” he said. “Nobody out there races that way. Nobody is going to give a Cup win up. They’re too hard to get.”
And there’s too much to lose if you get caught. Truex nearly lost everything because of it in 2013.
Then with Michael Waltrip Racing, he was the unwitting beneficiary of an attempt to “manipulate the outcome,” thenNASCAR vice president of competition Robin Pemberton said of the regular-season finale at Richmond Raceway, when Clint Bowyer inexplicably spun and Brian Vickers pitted under green for no apparent reason in the waning laps. The shuffling of the running order put teammate Truex in the postseason. But using suspicious radio chatter and circumstances as evidence, the series hammered MWR with some of the most impactful penalties in NASCAR, effectively editing Truex from the playoffs.
In the aftermath, Truex sponsor NAPA evacuated, forcing the collapse of his program. The team folded after the 2015 season when co-owner Rob Kauffman left to purchase a stake in Ganassi Racing. Truex’s budding career was imperiled until he landed with up-and-coming Fur- niture Row Racing in 2014, which he and crew chief Cole Pearn have helped develop into a championship contender — if not the favorite — based on his often-dominating performances this season.
So after the tribulations and the exploited new opportunity in a sport that doesn’t offer such readily, it’s understandable that Truex would not want any talk of any chicanery.
In a series in which teammates trade racing lines on restarts and the angle of a pitting car can be deemed nefarious in the proper context, Truex and every playoff driver with a teammate in need will be scrutinized heavily in the next three races ( before the playoffs start Sept. 17 at Chicagoland Speedwway).
Not only wins, but positioning for playoff points will matter as the new stage racing system has playoff-push pressure applied for the first time.
It doesn’t take a red Ferrari moving out of the way to look suspicious. Especially when a lot of eyes will be watching the next few weeks.