Martin Truex Jr. has never been a look-at-me type driver.
Truex hails from New Jersey, where he harvested clams for the family business before following his father’s footsteps into racing. A protégé of Dale Earnhardt Jr., Truex burst onto the NASCAR national scene with back-to-back Xfinity Series championships in 2004 and 05 before beginning a Cup Series career that has seen him scratch and claw his way to the top.
He is not controversial. The word “flashy” is not one associated with Truex. Instead, it’s more accurate to say Truex has always been about doing the job and doing it well, and everything else is just noise and nonsense. A headline maker, Truex is not.
This makes it ironic that in 2023, the headlines about Truex’s future are waiting to be written as he has everyone looking at him, looking and hanging on his every word, anxious to learn what is to come for him.
Truex, who turned 43 last month, is still weighing what he will do in 2024. Monday evening, after earning his third victory of the season at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Truex was as open and revealing as he’s ever been about the process.
“This sport isn’t exactly what it appears to be sometimes,” Truex said. “It takes a big commitment.
“I don’t know that running good and winning makes a difference. It would be pretty awesome to win the championship and walk off into the sunset. I just don’t really know.”
Joe Gibbs and Toyota Racing Development’s David Wilson would love for it to be as simple as Truex running well on the track in his No. 19 Toyota and having fun. Neither is ready for Truex to leave their team.
Since his first full Cup Series season in 2006, Truex has made 632 consecutive starts. He’s won at least one race in eight of the last 10 seasons.
As the NASCAR world awaits confirmation of his plans from Truex — which he continues to say will come soon — it’s natural to think about his résumé. Truex has put together a Hall of Fame career, largely in recent years.
Truex won just two races through his first eight seasons, driving first for Dale Earnhardt Inc., then Earnhardt Ganassi and Michael Waltrip Racing. When he joined the now-shuttered Furniture Row Racing in 2014, things changed.
In 2015, a lone victory qualified Truex for the postseason and he went all the way to the championship race. The underdog finished fourth. A year later, the underdog title began to fade away when the organization joined the Toyota fold and earned four victories.
A championship came in 2017, along with eight victories and a tear through the series in the first year of stage racing. Truex, in fact, remains one of the best drivers in the stage racing era.
Truex enjoyed more multi-win seasons in 2018 and ’19. In the stretch between 2017 and ’21, Truex appeared in the championship race four times and finished no worse than second.
There is not a lot left for Truex to accomplish in NASCAR, although victory in the Daytona 500 is still out there. But he’s already won other crown jewel events, such as the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway and the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.
It’s been an impressive career that has Truex tied for 20th on the all-time wins list with Kurt Busch at 34 victories. Truex has won on every type of racetrack except one: a superspeedway. And it’s become a theme that Truex doesn’t just win races, he dominates them.
In 16 of his 34 victories, Truex led for a double-digit number of laps. In 20 of those victories, Truex led the most laps in the event. During his unprecedented victory in the 2016 running of the Coca-Cola 600, Truex led a record 588 out of 600 miles (392 of 400 laps).
Of the active tracks on the Cup Series schedule, Truex has led laps on all but two of them: the Chicago street course and the Indianapolis road course.
The list goes on. When put into context, Truex should go down as one of the best drivers the Cup Series has ever seen.
So, whenever the time does come that Truex decides he’s going to hang up the helmet, he will be just as missed as some of those who departed before him. And there will be no denying he made just as big a mark on the sport.