An old-fashioned Las Vegas gamble cost Martin Truex Jr. big in Sin City on Sunday afternoon.During the caution period separating Stages 1 and 2 in the NASCAR Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, crew chief James Small made the decision to leave Truex and the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota on track after a 14-lap stint on fresh tires.
The rest of the field took fresh rubber behind him, and the once-competitive No. 19 car quickly plummeted through the leaderboard before rallying to an eighth-place finish — Truex’s first top-15 finish since Watkins Glen International in August.
Truex questioned the initial call under the yellow flag but ultimately followed the order. But after a stronger start for the 2017 champion, the No. 19 car struggled mightily in traffic and never truly rebounded from that deficit.
“He told me that (decision) pretty late around the corner in (Turns) 3 and 4, and my gut reaction was don’t do it. Don’t stay out,” Truex said. “And I just, I like to listen to my crew chief and do whatever they say no matter what because they know more of what’s going on than you do. And usually, the driver’s 90% of the time wrong if they make their own decision or go against the crew chief. So I went with it, but I didn’t feel good about it.
“And then, you know, nine laps, 10 laps or whatever here is a lot on tires, so you know, if we could have got a quick caution, it would have worked out great because we had the lead for whatever a few laps, but you know, once I got back to third or fourth, it just dropped like a rock.” When the next yellow flag flew 25 laps later, Truex radioed the car was “terrible.”
“Sorry. We completely (expletive) that up,” Small responded “I almost didn’t listen to you, but I’m not really good at that,” Truex said“Yeah, you should not have listened clearly,” Small said. “We have no idea what we’re doing.”
The brunt of the damage from that moment forward occurred on restarts, where Truex lost ground before eventually passing others back during the course of a long run.
“It was just trying to figure out how to minimize the damage and hope that we could get a longer run,” Truex said. “We did at the end, which was really helpful. I don’t know what we had going on. Restarting up front, we were pretty good, and then on the long runs, really good – I thought – probably a third-place car, but once we got back there – 16th, 18th, whatever it was – it was just really bad on the restart.
“I would lose three, four, five spots every time, and then once we got strung out and got going, I would pick them off and work our way forward, but then we would get another caution, and I would lose a couple more. It was an uphill battle, but luckily, at the end, we were able to have a couple of better restarts and at least maintain, and then work our way forward from there. All-in-all, it was OK. The pit call obviously really killed us in Stage 2.”
The frustrations were palpable post-race after Truex entered with confidence. The New Jersey native entered the postseason tied for the No. 1 seed after scoring the Regular Season Championship, but mistakes and poor luck have battered the No. 19 team on the results sheets. As he bled positions on restarts, Truex tried to focus on the job at hand and put that disappointment aside.
“All I can do is drive the damn thing as hard as I can and get all the lap time I can get out of it and, you know, not worry about where we’re at or what’s going on,” Truex said. “Just drive as hard as I can and get everything I can and be as smart as I can and then hopefully try to just make it up later.”
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