After qualifying eighth for the Kobalt 400, Martin Truex Jr. ran up front throughout the whole race en route to scoring a second-place finish.
“Just another solid weekend really in general,” Truex commented. “Just had a good day on Friday, practiced well yesterday, felt good about the car going into today, and just had another solid day, no mistakes, no bad luck, fast race car. And the biggest thing, I guess, I was proud of today or took away from it was we were off a little bit at the beginning of the race and worked on it all day long, continued to get better, and at the end of the day we were the best we’ve been all day.
“That’s what you like to see out of your team, you like to finish strong, and all in all just really proud of the guys for giving me a fast race car all weekend long, giving me a fast race car each weekend this year really. Got a lot of momentum on our side right now, and hopefully we can keep building on that, build some more momentum, and hopefully be able to catch that 4 (Kevin Harvick) car in a couple of weeks.”
Truex Jr. enters the season with a crew chief, Cole Pearn, on top of the pit box leading the way, and has attributed his success to the new crew chief’s approach. He also adds that the success comes from the alliance that Furniture Row Racing has with Richard Childress Racing, and the fact that they’re going into their second year with that.
“Cole really came up and our engineer Jazzy, they really came up through that RCR program,” Truex noted. “So they’re really tight with the group there and really bought into their engineering program, really buying into the way they’re building their cars, and really trying to stay on the same page and not say, well, we’re going to go down this road and do our own thing. We’re going to use some of what we can get from you and use some of our own stuff.
“Just getting more experience together, getting more confidence in each other, and really just having a better game plan going into the season is a big part of the reason why the cars are running better, and all the teams seem to be running closer together.”
The past year, Truex Jr. has been through a lot as his longtime girlfriend Sherry Pollex fought ovarian cancer. On top of that, the performance last year wasn’t there, with Truex running in the 20s each week. He admits that last year there were days that he didn’t really want to think about racing due to how miserable the performance was.
“I think at the end of the day, I’m proud of our guys for sticking behind me,” he commented. “I think that there was never a time where I quit on them. I never gave up on them. We worked hard all year long, and we definitely started to see some light at the end of the tunnel at the end of the season, and that was a good thing. That really is what spurred on the — you know, the performance that we have now, because we started to understand things. Things started to make sense, and we had a plan at the end of the season of how we were going to go about doing this, trying to get this team turned around.
“So it was good that everybody fought hard last year and never gave up, and we’ve got a great owner. Barney Visser has been behind us 100 percent since I’ve been there, and just real thankful for that and thankful for all the guys on the team and the job they’ve done.”
Truex added that Pollex’s cancer put things into perspective for him, as those bad days at the race track weren’t truly as bad as you would originally think.
“hen you get a glimpse of something that could possibly change your life like that in a bad way, it makes you look at things a lot differently,” he continued. “Suddenly those bad days at the racetrack weren’t so bad. Suddenly they were okay, and I knew that if we just kept working hard, we could get through it all, and certainly I feel like we have now. But we’re going to continue to work hard and try to get to that next level. We want to win races. We have got a great team. We have got good equipment right now, and it’s important when you’re in those positions to try to take advantage of that.
“We’re going to keep pushing and try to get better and hopefully get in victory lane a few times.”
