In 2015, Martin Truex Jr. went from longtime journeyman to a breakout contender with a win at Pocono Raceway. In 2016, he went from breakout contender to legitimate championship contender, achieving his first multi-win season of his career. He shows no signs of slowing down this season after 13 races.
He opened the season with a 13th-place finish in the Daytona 500 and followed it up with an eighth-place finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway. He put on a dominant drive and took advantage of Brad Keselowski’s ailing car in the closing laps to win at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The next races included 11th at Phoenix, fourth at Fontana, 16th at Martinsville, eighth at Texas, eighth at Bristol — in addition to 116 laps led and a late speeding penalty — and 10th at Richmond.
Truex’s only lousy finish on the season was a 35th at Talladega Superspeedway, thanks to getting caught up in a late race multi-car wreck.
He rebounded with a 104-lap led victory drive at Kansas Speedway.
Truex left Charlotte Motor Speedway the points leader after leading 233 laps and finishing third.
He led 102 laps and brought his car home to a third-place finish at Dover International Speedway.
Statistically, he’s on track to have the best season of his career. He’s amassed double the top-fives he accrued in each of the lasted two seasons and is already halfway to eclipsing his top-10 total from 2016.
But where Truex has excelled over the competition is the accumulation of stage points, stage wins and playoff points. In addition to the 10 playoff points he’s acquired via his two wins, he’s collected eight additional playoff points as a result of his eight stage wins through the season. This includes a clean sweep of the stages and race victory at Las Vegas.
While many were caught off guard on just how important stage points would be this season, Truex said his team had a plan from the start on how to tackle it.
“We planned it all. We said this was exactly how we were going to do it and here we are,” Truex said. “Everybody comes with the same plan and it starts with being consistent and running up front each and every week and having fast race cars and we’ve been able to do that.
“At the same time, we’ve been able to not make mistakes, be consistent, not a lot of issues and I think our only really bad races was Talladega and that’s Talladega. We’ve been able to just get more points than everybody so just a job well done by our team and all of our guys. It’s really going better than we even imagined so far. It’s been fun and it’s been a real treat to be consistently up front each week, leading laps and I’m having a blast right now so I’m having fun.”
