1. Can Martin Truex Jr. wake up from his nightmare season?
Ever since the 400-mile NASCAR Cup Series race at Darlington Raceway in May, Martin Truex Jr. has been a part of a perpetual bad dream that’s become reality.
Sitting second in points after Kansas Speedway with 12 consecutive top 15s and an average finish of 8.9, Truex has since gone on to record two top 10s, four top 15s and an abysmally awful average finish of 23.9 in his last 14 starts. The low point came in Sunday’s (Sept. 1) Southern 500, as Truex made a rookie mistake on lap 2 that took both himself and Ryan Blaney out of the race.
After looking like a playoff lock that was on the cusp of winning multiple races in May, Truex has since completed a slow-motion collapse to end the regular season, only sneaking his way into the playoffs by six points over Chris Buescher.
But with the regular season now over, Truex has the perfect opportunity to reset for the final 10 races of his full-time Cup career.
Because while he has an average finish of 23.9 in his last 14 starts, speed hasn’t been a problem for the No. 19 team.
At Darlington in May, he was swept up in a multi-car crash and relegated to 25th with damage. At World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway in June, Truex had a flat tire under green while running in the top 10, and he was unable to get back on the lead lap en route to a 34th-place finish. At Sonoma Raceway a few weeks later, a fuel sputter in the final corner dropped him from second to 27th.
He was on pace for top-10 finishes at Nashville Superspeedway and the Chicago street course, but he was collected in wrecks at the end of both races. At Richmond Raceway in August, Truex was relegated to dead last with an engine failure after running in the top five all night. And as usual, Truex was swept up in an early Big One at Daytona International Speedway and spent the rest of the night off the pace.
It’s only in recent weeks that Truex’s poor results have been self-inflicted. In the Brickyard 400, he wiped out while battling for fifth. With seven laps to go at Michigan International Speedway, he threw away a top-five finish by hitting the wall. And in the Southern 500, he took himself out with one of the fastest cars after a whopping two laps.
The speed has always been there for the No. 19 team, even in this horrendous stretch. Instead, it’s been a combination of poor luck, poor execution and mistakes that have sent Truex spiraling into one…
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