Martin Truex Jr. put in a dominating performance on Sunday at Sonoma Raceway to pick up his second win of the NASCAR Cup Series season.
He led a race-high 51 laps of the race’s 110 on his way to the victory. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver made the winning pass on Chase Elliott with 14 laps to go.
“Just a lot of hard work by everybody, everybody at Toyota, TRD, JGR in the off-season to kind of redesign — we got to do some work with NASCAR to redesign some stuff,” said Truex. “Everybody did. They did a good job there. Just hats off to my team…all the guys. To be so bad here last year and to come back and do this with the same car basically, it’s really unbelievable. Just proud of them.
“We’re having a great year. I feel really good about our team, Bass Pro Shops, Toyota, TRD, Reser’s Fine Foods, Auto-Owners, Noble Aerospace, Sherwin-Williams, FlightSafety, Oakley. I got them all in this time. Last time I screwed up.
“We couldn’t do this without all of our partners, all of our fans. Man, feels incredible to have a day like that, a run like that, a team like I have. They’re doing everything right right now and it’s a lot of fun to drive these cars. Thanks to them.”
The victory is Truex’s fourth at Sonoma and the 33rd of his career.
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He drove from fourth to the lead and the win off of the race’s final restart with 15 laps to go and was leading the race when the caution flew, being brought to pit road by crew chief James Small.
Elliott stayed out and inherited the race lead. Truex made short work of him when catching the Hendrick Motorsports driver. Kyle Busch, who also pitted under the final caution, followed Truex through but was unable to mount a challenge for the race win.
Busch won the second stage and ultimately finished more than 3s behind the JGR Toyota.
Joey Logano finished third, Chris Buescher fourth and Elliott fifth. It was Elliott’s first race back after a week suspension.
AJ Allmendinger finished sixth, Michael McDowell seventh, Kyle Larson eighth, Christopher Bell ninth, and Ross Chastain 10th.
Grant Enfinger finished 26th in his Cup Series debut. He drove the No. 42 for Legacy Motor Club with Noah Gragson sidelined by concussion-like symptoms.
Pole-sitter Denny Hamlin was the only driver who failed to finish the race. He led 33 laps but crashed with 19 laps to go when he hit the inside wall on the frontstretch coming off Turn 11 and then shot to the outside wall and hit with the right side of his car.
With no cautions for stage breaks, there were two natural cautions in Sunday’s race. There were 10 lead changes among six drivers.