Martin Truex Jr. capped off his NASCAR Cup Series career wishing he could have performed better at Phoenix Raceway while still denying those expecting an emotional sendoff.
“No emotions,” Truex said after finishing 17th. “I wanted to run [well], man. I wanted to run better than that and thought early on it was going to be a good day, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse the harder we tried and the more we tried to do to the car. I don’t know.
“It’s been [like that] lately — qualify good and then the hotter the track gets, the more rubber goes down, the more we struggle. I don’t know what we got going on there, but I wish we could have put some tires on at the end, at least, and had a shot to go forward. It wasn’t much fun at the end running on old tires.”
Truex started from the pole in his No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota and led the first nine laps. It was the only time he spent at the front of the field.
Joey Logano overtook Truex for the top spot and won the first stage. Truex crossed the line second, but on the pit stops under the stage break caution, Truex came off pit road seventh and the lost track position ended up being the beginning of the slide backward.
“It started off well,” crew chief James Small said. “We contended to win the first stage, and then we lost a lot of track positions there, and everything got worse. Through the middle of the second stage we started to have some brake issues and that just created handling problems. The pedal started getting long, and he couldn’t slow down. It (the car) started getting tight, and it was a vicious cycle going backward.
“It started off so promising – yesterday was great. It’s a frustrating way to end. It kind of sums up our season the way it unraveled there.”
Truex was the toast of Sunday pre-race activities. A video package in the driver’s meeting led to a standing ovation from his fellow competitors.
“It was unexpected, I guess,” Truex said. “It was very cool, a huge honor. I’m very honored and humbled to be recognized like that.”
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On the grid, it is a procedure to use chalk to mark the car number as a placeholder for when the team brings out their car. NASCAR, however, did not use No. 19 for Truex’s car on Sunday but wrote “Gone Fishing” on pit road instead.
“I thought that was cool because I’m going to be doing a lot of that,” Truex said.
He has plans to run the Daytona 500 next season, a race he has never won. Joe Gibbs is also open to having him potentially run Xfinity Series races for the organization, but he still has no second thoughts about retirement.
“Still not sad,” he said. “Everybody wants me to be sad [and] I’m happy. I’m celebrating. I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, a lot to be proud of. I’m going to enjoy some time off here and do the banquet and all that fun stuff, and it’s going to be fun to come back in a different role and race for fun.
“Hopefully I’ll be able to have fun. It’s so hard to have fun when you take it this seriously, and I was having fun early today, and then it got miserable. I was hoping today would go better so it’d be more fun. We’ll see. I’m looking forward to Daytona.”
As a driver who needed to fulfill post-race media obligations, Truex was parked near the pit road exit with the championship contenders. It meant he had a long walk back down pit road toward the exit. As he did so, he came across Small, and the two stopped not to reminisce but to debrief about the day, even if the information was no longer relevant to Truex.
“Usually, I don’t get to see him afterward [because] he’s sprinting,’ Small laughed. “It was good to see him. I’m sure we’ll talk more this week, but he’s going fishing somewhere.”