With two wins in the first half of the NASCAR Cup series regular season, conversation around Martin Truex Jr. will be that the 2017 series champion and the No. 19 team are back in form.
But the team never really went anywhere.
Truex had an off year in 2022 by missing the playoffs and going winless. Certainly below expectations for a driver of his caliber and a team fielded out of Joe Gibbs Racing, but the numbers were deceiving.
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It all came down to execution. Truex was adamant as last season wrapped up that the pieces were there and he had the team personnel he wanted, but they weren’t doing what they needed to do. There were also bouts of strange misfortune like being spun on pit road at Homestead-Miami when Truex was leading.
Nothing has changed from the driver and team that couldn’t catch a break last year to the one that stomped the competition on Sunday in Sonoma. Now, though, the execution is there in preparation and on pit road, and Truex took a fast car and put on a masterclass of left and right-hand turns.
“We make less mistakes,” crew chief James Small said. “We never changed our process. We never stopped believing. It’s just we’re executing. To win a race, you have to be perfect, you have to execute. So many times last year, we were so close, just things would go wrong, things like that.
“To be fair, we’re doing a better job now as a team on pit road with the cars, everything. The guys back in the shop have been working really hard. The way we ran here last year, we were terrible. It was embarrassing. You come to Sonoma with Martin Truex, and you expect to win. Thankfully today we gave him a car, and he was able to do that.”
Despite not being a part of the 2022 postseason, Truex was a top-five driver in the championship standings through the regular season. He also led over 500 laps. There is also no denying it was a year of learning the new car, but from a driver’s standpoint, Truex never complained too much about adjusting to it.
And it was a bit ironic that Truex had a dominating performance at Sonoma – road courses were one style of racetrack that Toyota was embarrassed at last year with its lack of performance. Toyota has won both road course races this season (Tyler Reddick winning the other at COTA) and looks much better on short tracks as well.
So while some doubted and questioned what was wrong with Truex, the driver never lost hope. The frustration within the group came from not winning when they were capable of, while also knowing just how capable they were of doing what they’ve done twice now in 16 races.
“We should have won a bunch of races last year,” Truex said. “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. That’s why my team is all the same still right now. We never gave up believing in each other. We just kept working hard.
“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.”
Truex’s flawless day also vaulted him into the Cup Series championship points lead.
“That’s a nice surprise,” Truex said.
What a difference a year makes. Truex and the team were doing the same things last year but went down to the wire trying to make the playoffs. Going into the second half of this season, Truex now gets to focus on the regular season championship and bonus points.
“Try to win every stage, try to win every race,” said Truex of going forward. “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.”
Business as usual. Not that it wasn’t before.