LONG POND
Guys like Martin Truex Jr. aren’t supposed to win races like this.
They can run well, sure. From the first lap through the 140th or so, they can run well. They add something to talk about before the guys who are supposed to win races like this actually do. They’re the entertainment before Jimmie Johnson or Jeff Gordon or Dale Earnhardt Jr. swoop in and get doused with their beverage of choice in Victory Lane.
They aren’t the stars. They accept this. They just get in their respective cars every weekend.
And they drive on.
It just so happened that, this time, the guy getting the champagne shower wasn’t one of those stars. Truex got into his car on a sunny Sunday afternoon at Pocono Raceway, and he drove on. And on. And on. Until it became clear that nobody in the field of the Axalta “We Paint Winners” 400 could touch him.
Not Kevin Harvick, who had the fastest car in all three practice sessions over the weekend. Not Kurt Busch, who held the pole position. Not Johnson, who finished third. Not Earnhardt or Gordon or any of the Hendrick Motorsports drivers who had built a seemingly indomitable five-race winning streak at the track.
By the time he crossed the start-finish line with the checkered flag waving over his speeding No. 78 Chevrolet’s roof, Truex led Harvick by 1.3 seconds. It wasn’t exactly a close finish, but that was easily as near to overtaking Truex as anybody had been throughout the final 26 laps. He led all but one of the final 67 laps.
“There was really no battle,” Harvick said after it ended.
A guy from New Jersey who hasn’t won a race in nearly two years, led by a rookie crew chief from London, Ontario, Canada, representing a team based not out of NASCAR’s North Carolina hotbed, but snowy Denver, became the entire story.
Watch enough of these races, and it’s easy to expect the same old result.
Guys like Truex are sport’s perpetual sidebars. Last week at Dover, he led 131 laps. The race before at Charlotte, he coincidentally led 131 laps. The race before that, in Kansas, he set the pace for 95 laps. That’s 357 laps in three races. No driver in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series led more. Yet, Johnson got two Victory Lane trips, and Carl Edwards got the other.
Truex just drove on, because that’s what guys like him do. Heck, even he knows the drill.
“Throughout my career, I’ve gotten used to the disappointment, honestly,” he said. “I’ve learned to deal with those days where it didn’t go your way, even though you didn’t do anything wrong.
“It would be easy to get down the last three weeks and hang your head, make excuses and honestly just be disappointed. But my team was excited. They knew we were going to get this win, and they knew we were going to get it soon.”
Excuse almost everyone who wrote that feeling off as little more than blind hope.
The reason guys like Truex don’t win races like this is because teams like Truex’s don’t win races, period. Not with any kind of regularity.
This is a sport dominated by big-money, all-star-dominated teams of drivers. The Henrdick team. The Gibbs team. Stewart-Haas, and Richard Childress Racing. They trade information. They bring in big bucks through endorsement deals. They soak up the wins and the attention and the championships.
Truex drives for Furniture Row Racing. There are no teammates. There is no trading information. The team owner is a Denver furniture magnate named Barney Visser, a former paratrooper in the Vietnam War who got into racing as a hobby. He started his Sprint Cup team in 2005 and, 10 years later, got just his second career win, the last of which came with Regan Smith at the wheel in Darlington in 2005.
Every week, team members load a truck with parts from Richard Childress Racing — the Furniture Row team has an agreement to buy engines and chassis and some other equipment — in North Carolina and haul it to Denver, where Truex’s cars are built. It’s not a conventional routine, but then again, there’s nothing conventional about this team.
Likely the only former University of Waterloo student working as a NASCAR crew chief, Cole Pearn said being stationed in Denver is something the young, tight-knit members of the No. 78 team committed to just to be part of it all. NASCAR isn’t exactly the Broncos out there, but they make it work. They have to.
“The size of their team doesn’t really matter,” Harvick said. “They probably spend as much money as anybody in the garage, if not more. But, they have a lot of logistics to overcome. It has taken them a long time to get the people in place, but they have good people.
“They put the effort in, and it shows.”
Look, racing isn’t easy for anybody. Not for Gordon or Johnson or Earnhardt or any of the stars on any of the big multi-car teams. But it has been plenty difficult for a guy like Martin Truex Jr., who has lost a ride and gone through struggles and been forgotten about and, ultimately, accepted all of it.
Sunday at Pocono, fans didn’t get the big star in Victory Lane. But they got the great story.
They got the guy who deserved it, perhaps more than anybody.
That’s how Truex beat the big boys, how the forgotten man got the unforgettable win.
(Collins is a columnist for The Times-Tribune. Contact him at dcollins@timesshamrock.com.)