April 10, 2021 | By Lee Spencer

Martin Truex Jr. looks to rekindle his Martinsville magic

Martin Truex Jr.’s win at Phoenix Raceway could be a harbinger for another Championship 4 berth.

In 2017, Truex won the third race of the season at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The following year he picked up the “W” in Race 5 at Auto Club Speedway. Both years Truex advanced to the final round of the Playoffs winning the 2017 title and finishing second to Joe Logano in 2018.

After dropping out of contention following the Round of 8 last year, has the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team regained its mojo?

“I have a good feeling about things,” Truex said. “Last year, we had a good season, but it was a little bit up and down. We had some tough weeks, and some really good ones, and a lot of really close second and third-place finishes. A lot to build on.

“I feel like we’ve hit the ground here with more confidence and understanding the no practice and how it all works, and the guys are doing a good job hitting the setups better when we start the race, so that’s been a really good thing.”

Winning this early enables the team to test different setups and strategies for the Playoff run. The next five race tracks—Martinsville, Richmond, Talladega, Kansas and Darlington—all reappear in the post-season.

“Obviously, every race is important, being that they are Playoff tracks is definitely important,” Truex said. “I don’t know that you can look and say here are the guys that are going to do good in the Playoffs just because they run well the next few weeks. A lot changes between now and then.

“I look forward to hopefully running well and hopefully getting a few more wins and building a notebook for the Playoffs is definitely an important thing.”

Truex can get a head start on the post-season with a solid run at Martinsville this weekend. In his first 18 starts at the half-mile track, he led just one lap and scored two top-five finishes. The 40-year-old’s fortunes changed to some degree after moving to Furniture Row Racing. From 2015 and through Truex’s transition to JGR, he has scored two wins, five top fives, nine top 10s and led 988 laps.

For last fall’s winner Chase Elliott the race proved to be the catalyst between advancing and winning the title and missing the final round. Truex appeared to be on his way to winning a third Martinsville grandfather clock last November prior to a vibration from a loose wheel taking the team out of contention with 30 laps remaining. But as the defending winner of the Blue Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500, Truex remains optimistic.

“It’s a tough place,” Truex said. “It’s a place once you figure out some things with your cars and how you like for them to feel. If they don’t change the tires too much, you can kind of take that and run with it and build on it that success. For us, it’s just been really figuring out what I needed in my car and making it do the things I needed it to do. We’ve been able to kind of do that here these last few trips pretty consistently. Just hope that we can make that happen again.

“It’s a tricky little place. It looks like Martinsville would be a pretty easy track just because it’s pretty small and flat corners and things like that, but it’s really technical and a lot goes on with the way the rubber gets down in the corners on the concrete and that can change things really drastically, so we will see when we get there this time around, but the last few races we were really strong, and I felt like we had a shot to win both of them. Of course, we won the spring race, so looking forward to going up to Martinsville, and hopefully, we can continue that success.”

While 2020 was a challenge with Covid-19 and NASCAR eliminating practice, Truex and the team also had to acclimate to a new crew chief calling the shots. James Small had been Truex’s engineer prior to his promotion, but the bar was set high by his predecessor Cole Pearn. Under Pearn’s direction, the pair won 25 of Truex’s 28 Cup victories. But over the last year, Small has settled into his new role.

“Overall, just having a notebook on everything we’ve been working on, we’ve been doing and really just getting better at not having practice and qualifying,” Truex said. “I think that’s been the biggest change. Between us, we just continue to work on all of the small details together. Just continuing to build on what we did last year and understanding things better has been a big key.

“I feel really good about where we are. I feel like we’ve been strong everywhere, especially since we’ve been to a lot of different types of racetracks so far. We’ve been pretty strong at just about all of them. I’m feeling good about where we are.

“It’s still early. There is a lot of things that are going to change, and we have to continue to work to find things to make our cars faster and continue to work hard and make sure that we are not making mistakes and do all the little things right which is always a challenge. I feel great about it. I feel like we have a championship-winning team, no doubt about it. We are ready to get after it and see if we can get it done.”