LOUDON, N.H. -- Martin Truex Jr. has become the most dangerous of all commodities behind the wheel of a race car this weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway: a guy with an axe to grind, nothing to lose, a goal in sight and the machinery to make something happen.

“

Yeah, I think this is [my breaking point]. The nice guy seems to always get pushed around and I'm tired of being the nice guy -- I'm tired of getting pushed around. I'm not going to take it anymore.

”

-- MARTIN TRUEX JR.

On Friday, three members of the Truex family: "Big Martin," a former Northeast winner in Busch North and Modified,; Martin Jr., a two-time [Nationwide] Series champion, and littlest brother Ryan gathered to announce that Ryan, the defending [K&N] East Series champion, would make his Nationwide Series debut next month at Gateway International Raceway.

But all anyone wanted to talk about was "Little Martin's" mid-race tiff with Jeff Gordon last weekend at Infineon Raceway. That incident put Truex Jr. back in the Toyota/Save Mart 350's field and got his No. 56 Michael Waltrip Racing Toyota destroyed when a chain-reaction wreck on a restart involved more than a half-dozen cars.

Truex Jr. almost barked a response when he was asked if he'd either spoken with Gordon or if his own perspective had changed in the five days since a sure top-10 finish became 42nd -- and a 93-point deficit to a spot in the Chase became 157 coming into New Hampshire -- the actual start of the 10-event "Race to the Chase."

Truex Jr. said he'd received a voice mail from Gordon, which he hadn't returned.

"No I don't feel differently, but why should I," Truex Jr. said, almost bristling to the point it was nerve-wracking to be near him. "Why would I feel different? I'm asking you? He left me a voice mail but I still feel the same way -- I'm in the same position I was in [Sunday]. So why would I feel different?

"I accept his apology, yes -- but things are gonna change between me and him, that's just the bottom line."

And, Truex Jr. said, so would his mode of racing.

"Absolutely, [we have to get more aggressive, because] we have nothing to lose from here, at this point," Truex Jr. said. "We've got to go, we've got to gain points -- we've got to run up front every week -- and we need to do whatever it takes to do that."

Truex Jr., who 99.9 percent of the time is patient, genial and even-keeled, said everyone will see a different model moving ahead -- starting immediately.

“

You don't know how they're going to deal with it. You just know that you probably have one coming from them. That's something that I can't control. All I can do is go out there and race the best that I can and try to avoid incidents, try to make life a little easier on them, because they're owed that.

”

-- JEFF GORDON

"Yeah, I think this is [my breaking point]," Truex Jr. said. "The nice guy seems to always get pushed around and I'm tired of being the nice guy -- I'm tired of getting pushed around.

"I'm not going to stand here and say, 'Well, I'm just going to go out and wreck Jeff,' because that's not me -- that's not how I do things. But some things are going to change. I'm not going to take it anymore, I'm going to race him the way he races me.

"And I'm going to race everyone else on the track the way they race me. If they don't respect me, they're not going to get anything back. That's just as simple as it is."

Truex Jr., who won Nationwide Series championships in consecutive years in 2004-2005, has never been known as an overly-aggressive driver. He said he didn't offer to turn the page, but having the equivalent of an entire volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica dropped on his foot had done more than make him hop around a bit.

"I know Jeff understands that and he told me when he apologized that he understands I'm mad -- he understands and knows he's got one coming," Truex Jr. said. "I'm sure he's been in this position before, too."

At his media availability that followed the Truex family's by about 20 minutes, Gordon chuckled when he was asked about being in the center of a "deli-style take-a-number and line up" mentality.

"I think so -- I think you're going to have to get in line," Gordon said. "Last week, we left the race track with quite a few guys upset at us and for good reason. It was intense racing and some mistakes on my part and when you make those kinds of decisions and those things happen, then you've got to deal with 'em.

"It might be for this weekend, it might be for the next several weeks, it might be several years down the road -- who knows, you know? You've just got to go with it, and that's what we'll do."

But Gordon said he was truly sorry about what happened with Truex.

"The thing that happened with Martin -- I don't have an excuse, I just made a mistake, there," Gordon said. "I was racing hard with Juan [Montoya], and I made a mistake that caused me to get into Martin, but it still was uncalled for.

"I owed Martin that [call]. I owed him at least an apology, a phone call and then some. So I genuinely felt terrible about what happened. I knew he wasn't going to call me back. I knew that it's going to be a long time, if ever, for him to forget about that. So, I did my part, I felt like I did the right thing, but I didn't expect anything in return."

But as far as Truex Jr. is concerned it's too late -- and not just for Gordon. Truex Jr. agreed that when a fellow driver needed a break, or a favor, he might not be willing to give it.

"I haven't seen much respect all year to be honest with you, on the race track," Truex Jr. said. "Guys take advantage of you every chance they get. We get put in a difficult position because the field is so close -- every spot means so much. The clean air situation, it's every spot means so much and there's so much pressure on us to get everything we can get.

"I think guys just cross the line too much. I don't know what the answers are to fix that, I just know how I'm going to do it and I'm just going to do what everybody else does to me every week."

That starts with Sunday's race at New Hampshire, a track where Truex had four consecutive top-seven finishes in 2007-2008 before he finished 37th and 19th last season -- getting wiped out in an accident at this event a year ago.

Truex Jr. had recently gotten himself into position to challenge for a Chase position, where he last raced for the championship in 2007, and he feels his team can still compete.

"The points are all that matters and there is a lot of pressure on our teams to get in [to the Chase]," Truex Jr. said. "Coming into this season, that was a big goal of ours and I feel like we haven't quite been good enough to get in that safe zone. We've been kind of hanging out in that danger zone and it only takes one guy's mistake -- like last week -- to almost take our shot away.

"We were sitting there in decent shape after [two weeks ago], yeah, the Pocono deal where some guys lost their heads [on the last lap] and cost us some points -- that happened again last week. We were going to have a great day and the way we were running, we were sitting there looking at being right back at the doorstep of 12th-place again.

"We were going to be real close so we were out-running the guys that were around us in points last week and we go from the high of feeling that and running well and feeling like we're doing a good job to leaving there 42nd, [157] points down and 19th [in the standings].

"At the end of the day, we're still 19th. It doesn't matter how we got there, everybody looks at us and says, 'You're 19th.' That is very, very frustrating. Nobody understands how difficult that is to deal with and that's what we deal with each week."

And make no mistake, Truex Jr. will deal with it, in his own time and in his own way.

"There's no saying that I'm going to pay [Gordon] back," Truex Jr. said. "Am I going to do what he did to me? I'm not going to stand here and say I am. I'm going to change the way I race him, yeah.

"I've always been very, very respectful -- I just have never got that back. It's just one of those deals where you race with a guy like Mark Martin and you run him down from a straightaway and he lets you go because he doesn't want to hold himself up, but at the same time he's doing you a favor.

"You run Jeff down -- if I run Jeff down from a straightaway -- he races me like we're going for the win [and] when he catches me, I don't do that to him. It's little things like that that you can do that make some people's world a living hell sometimes.

"There's been times when Jeff's caught me and never even give me a chance to get out of the way, he just started running into me and he's the first guy to hang his middle finger out the window when he goes by you. Things are going to change, that's all I'm saying."

And Denny Hamlin, who's been on a tear lately but has also run into a person or two throughout his rise to the top of the proverbial Cup Series competition meter, said he knows what Gordon faces.

"I think you're seeing a lot of self-policing going on out there, but trust me, Jeff Gordon will be looking in his mirror for the next x-amount of weeks knowing, 'Did I wreck that guy? Did I wreck that guy?'" Hamlin said. "It's just part of it. If I was in his shoes, I'd be doing the same thing because you know that everyone else has one up on you and they owe you.

"I don't think you'll see anything blatant, but trust me, there's gonna be guys that maybe I did wrong or he did wrong that are going to race you harder in the long run because you did that. Payback is not always about wrecking a guy -- it's more just sitting in his mirror and making him think."

"Like I said, I'm going to deal with whatever comes my way," Gordon said. "When you hit a guy, there are several ways that the whole thing goes down. If you run into a guy for no reason, then you should know that you're going to have to deal with something going forward -- either the guy is going to have a lot of patience and just loom there and make you sweat it out, or he's going to get you back right away.

"You don't know how they're going to deal with it. You just know that you probably have one coming from them. That's something that I can't control. All I can do is go out there and race the best that I can and try to avoid incidents, try to make life a little easier on them, because they're owed that. At the same time we're out there trying to win races, so we've got to keep doing that as well."

Video:
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