Truex hopes title caps big year
He’s up against contenders with championships
Martin Truex Jr. has had a career year across this Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season, and he has been particularly effective in the heat of the playoffs.
Entering Sunday’s next-to-last race of the year at Phoenix Raceway, Truex is first in points, leads the series in victories with seven and can boast a playoff record that could be favorably compared to a pitcher logging a low ERA in the World Series.
Through eight playoff races, Truex has three wins and two seconds. Throw out the Talladega race, in which he finished 23rd because of a wreck, and he has a superb average finish of 2.28.
Yet the New Jersey driver, having joined Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick as qualifiers for the playoff finale, is lagging in one department as teams gear up for the championship battle at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Busch (2015) and Harvick (2014) have something Truex doesn’t — a Cup championship. Also holding a title is Brad Keselowski (2012), who sits fourth in points and has a good shot at winning the fourth Homestead slot for the all-or-nothing championship finale.
Despite the fact Truex has had a spectacular season, he might ride into Homestead racing for the big trophy against three guys who have been there and accomplished that.
Does that matter?
“I think experience matters,” NBC analyst and retired driver Jeff Burton told USA TODAY. “No matter what drivers will tell you, when you get in that championship battle, it’s different. The first time you experience it is different from the third time you experience it.
“Jimmie Johnson (a seven-time champion) never thought he was mentally tough. He had to prove to himself that he was. Everybody gets the jitters. They’ll tell you they don’t, that it’s just another race, but they’re lying.”
Truex, 37, has experience, and he won championships in the Xfinity Series in 2004 and 2005, so he knows the landscape. But Homestead will be a different ballgame, with every positive and negative magnified in a race in which the first finisher of the Final Four drivers will win the Cup championship. For Truex, the rule is to stay the course.
“Worrying about things out of your control really doesn’t do you any good,” he said. “I think when we go to the racetrack, we really focus in on what we’ve got to do to run up front on Sunday, what we have to do to qualify good.
“That’s kind of our mind-set. We came from 2014 being nobodies, and we’ve learned along the way how to con- trol ourselves and our thought process and how to get the most out of each other and ourselves as a group.”
Although the intensity naturally will rise in the days before the final race and during the event itself, and media and fan attention will be elevated considerably, Truex said he plans to glide along as normally as possible.
“I know playoff races are a big deal and there’s a lot on the line, but if you try to be someone different than you’ve been all year or try to do something different than you normally do, you’ll get yourself in trouble,” he said. “I think you just try to stay in your comfort zone, you do the things you know you can handle and are good at and take advantage of your strengths.”
Truex won the two Xfinity titles while driving for a team co-owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr., who remains one of Truex’s best friends in the garage.
“He (Truex) has always overachieved and always has gotten everything out of the car that the car was capable of getting, if not more,” Earnhardt said.
Denny Hamlin, who has bounced around the edges of a championship but hasn’t won one, said owning the title trophy doesn’t necessarily provide an edge in future competition.
“I think it’s about the speed that you have now,” said Hamlin, who remains in the hunt for the final Homestead slot. “There are first-time champions all the time for a reason. It just works out for them. Kyle got it a few years ago, and Harvick got his first a few years before that, so I think that it’s all about how you’re performing at this given time. Anytime that you have just a one-race shootout for a championship, it’s about who’s the fastest, and that’s it.”
Truex has been the fastest of the fast for much of the year. Soon, he’ll race against champions for the chance to call himself one.