Martin Truex Jr. has reached the age where it would have been easy to let doubt creep in once the results started tapering off last season.
After going winless and missing the playoffs in the first year of a radically different car, it would have been easy to believe the discipline was starting to pass him by or that his skillset at 42 years old wasn’t quite sharp enough to match the likes of Joey Logano, William Byron, and Ross Chastain.
It’s not rational, but a year-and-a-half losing streak overrides reason.
Today’s race craft is extremely aggressive, cutthroat, and the Next Gen is fundamentally different than the style of car he spent the past two decades mastering. And honestly, while mulling retirement last spring, Treux had every opportunity to call it quits.
He could have listened to whatever irrational demons might have tried to move in but shut them down immediately.
There were mistakes last year, sure, but it wasn’t a lack of performance that kept him out of Victory Lane. Toyota was especially down in performance on short tracks and road courses last year, but it wasn’t the driver.
He knew that.
So, when he decided to come back, and immediately backed it up with a victory in the pre-season Clash at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, that was validation. So was his first points-paying race in 53 starts at Dover on May 1. Now with a win at Sonoma, his de facto third overall this season, Truex is back even if he swears he was never gone.
“I got that question a lot last year because we didn’t win,” Truex said about the possibility of internal doubt. “I never thought we couldn’t win again. We should have won a bunch of races last year.
“Even though our cars probably weren’t the best cars in the field, Toyota as a group was probably off, I still felt like we should have won five or six races. We had some bad luck. We had some crazy things happen. That’s just racing. I don’t think anybody got down.”
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Martin Truex Jr. always believed in himself, and his team
Truex never lost faith in crew chief James Small, who was his lead engineer before that, and never lost faith in the team they assembled around them. Even after the winless season and not making the playoffs, Joe Gibbs Racing kept the entire No. 19 team intact.
“We just kept working hard,” Truex said. “We have to work harder, be smarter, make better decisions. You put better cars with that, the next thing you know, you’re winning races, leading laps again.
“I never thought we couldn’t win another race. Sometimes you think you may not win another race, but we know we are capable. That’s different I think.”
It’s more than a semantical distinction, for sure.
Small says NASCAR’s decision to move to a lower downforce configuration for short tracks and road courses this season was a significant factor in turning things around. It’s no surprise that their three wins this year have come on two short tracks and a road course.
“We were trying to do things last year that were so out of the box to try and make the car do things in certain areas that we thought it needed to do,” Small said. “Now everything just makes more sense. We don’t seem so stupid anymore.”
Truex said he, Small and their engineers just overthought the new car last season. Sure, NASCAR moving to low downforce helped and so did an off-season change to Toyota’s bodywork but mostly, the driver said they just got back to basics.
“We shot ourselves in the foot a few times,” Truex said. “Here (at Sonoma) was one of them, for sure. We came here, completely disregarded everything we knew about this track thinking it was a new car and that meant it was going to be different.
“We ran terrible. It was like, okay, that was dumb, we’re idiots.”
Noted: It wasn’t that Truex was old, not willing to be aggressive or wasn’t any good last year. He and Small just aren’t stupid. They simply smartened up and are now fourth in both championship points and the all-important playoff points.
They went from being championship non-factors last year to one of the handful of championship favorites. The win also puts him in position to win the regular season championship and the 15 bonus points for the playoffs that come with it, not that it drives them any more or less.
“It really doesn’t,” Truex said. “We try to win every stage, try to win every race. That’s kind of what we’ve always done. Even last year when we didn’t do any of that, that was always our goal going into a weekend. It doesn’t really change anything.”
So here we are again, one year later and Truex is once again mulling retirement, but this time as a championship threat instead of a fringe playoff threat.
Truex said back in February that results would probably dictate the decision.
“I’m going to make that decision when the time comes,” he said during Daytona 500 Media Day. “Until then, I’m going to work my ass off and try to win a bunch of races. If that’s the case and that’s happening, then I’ll probably be back…pretty simple, really.”
Well, it’s happening, so it seems pretty reasonable that Truex would want to come back for a 20th full-time season, but not even his longtime engineer and current crew chief knows for sure.
“Yeah, (we’re) definitely running well (so that) definitely doesn’t hurt,” Small said. “He plays his cards pretty close to his chest, so who knows what the hell he’s thinking.”
The candid Australian said that with a laugh.
“It’s definitely all pointing in the right direction if he wants to stick around.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
