Martin Truex Jr.’s win at Phoenix on Sunday was his first in the NASCAR Cup Series since June 10, 2020 win he earned his lone W of the year last season at Martinsville.
Since Martinsville in 2019, those are the only two for the Joe Gibbs Racing star and 2017 NASCAR champion.
It’s been a bit of a dry spell, and it didn’t look like it was getting better at the start of this year either.
Truex Jr. was leading the Clash during the waning laps at Daytona when he crashed and was relegated to a last-place finish. He followed it up with a wreck in the 500, and while he wasn’t as bad the next three weeks, he wasn’t in victory lane.
His win on Sunday broke a 29-race winless streak and was just his second with crew chief James Small.
He said they simply took a swing at it.
“We took a huge swing at the car for this race,” Truex Jr. said. “We knew what we’ve been doing here in the past two races wasn’t good. Car didn’t do anything I needed it to do. We just went to work on it. James and the guys did an awesome job with that.”
Now, Truex Jr. has gone on stretches like this before, but that was far different than after his ride to stardom and his top tier spot with Joe Gibbs Racing.
In his championship season and both of the two years afterwards, Truex Jr. had four wins or more. Two of those times it was seven or more.
The two-year stretch he is on right now differs vastly, but he’s not letting that effect him.
“No, I mean, that’s not a lot really,” Truex Jr. said of the 29-race drought. “I’ve been a whole lot longer than that in my career. I don’t look at those numbers. I don’t really pay attention to it. Yeah, 29 is nothing. I never even thought about it, to be honest. We’ve been capable of winning a lot of races between the last one and the one today. These races are really hard to win. That’s really all I can say about it.”
Truex Jr. got a taste with that last year with Small.
The team had put strong runs together in the later end of the year including a stretch of seven podium finishes and another three top 5’s in the playoffs.
They didn’t get a second win, though.
“I’m thankful for today,” Truex Jr. said. “(It’s a) huge boost. (It gives me) huge confidence. I’ll be honest with you, if we would have come here last year in the final four, I would have been not very confident. Last year we struggled here for some reason. It’s never been our greatest track, I’ll say that. It’s always been just okay. I’ve never come here with a really warm, fuzzy feeling that we’re going to go there and win, we’re going to go there and be really, really strong and lead laps.”
However, that’s what Small and Truex Jr. did on Sunday and now that we’ve seen them get over that hump, could it mean that the 19 goes back to being a flagship Championship 4 contender?
That’s where Small says that the strategy is going to go to.
“Now we can just concentrate on refining what we do every week, try to get more wins, more bonus points,” Small said. “That’s ultimately in the Playoffs where we struggled, was the bonus point count. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction for that.”
You’ll see Truex Jr. taking a stage win rather than opting to pit ahead of it and all the normal bonus point collecting strategies there are, and maybe that will change things.
Maybe that will be the biggest key to the 19 team competing for a spot in the Championship 4 this year.
But there’s really only one thing – winning – that you can put above the rest of those strategies, and Truex Jr. at least got back to that.
“You never know when your last one is going to be, you’ve got to enjoy them all,” Truex Jr. said. “I’m certainly really proud of this one.”
