FORT WORTH, Texas — People love a good underdog story.
Chances are, that opening sentence made some of you reading this chant, “Rudy! Rudy!” under your breath, but what about when you’re the one being overlooked, cast aside and not given your due?
That’s the position Martin Truex Jr. and his No. 78 Furniture Row Racing team find themselves in — despite being third in points with three races left in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season.
The veteran explained that it’s a double-edged sword Friday at Texas Motor Speedway, site of Sunday’s AAA Texas 500 (2 p.m. ET, NBC, PRN, SiriusXM).
“There’s two sides to it. I really enjoy the underdog role; it’s really cool and I think for a lot of reasons, if you look at our race team, we are an underdog,” said Truex, who earned his Chase berth with a win in June at Pocono. “I’ve never been in a championship battle in this series. I’ve got a rookie crew chief. We’re a single-car team in Denver. There’s a lot of reasons why we do fit the mold of an underdog.
“At the same time, I get frustrated sometimes because I feel like what we’ve done this season gets overlooked and people have short memories. We were second in points in the summer and we’ve had a really good season. There’s a lot of times where I’d like my team to get a lot more credit than they have. Sometimes I’d like to get a little more credit as a driver, but at the end of the day, that’s not what really matters. What really matters is us coming out here and doing our jobs.”
Truex has quietly performed at a consistently high level all season. Be it his overall reserved demeanor or ability to stay out of the dramatic spotlight some of the other high-profile drivers have found themselves in, Truex’s name doesn’t seem to be mentioned as often as the rest of the front of the pack, despite the fact he’s performed better than most of it.
Especially when it comes to title talk, Truex is all but forgotten from the general conversation. It’s odd, because at this point with a trio of races left, the New Jersey native’s stats — one win, eight top fives and 21 top 10s — eclipse those of 2014 Ryan Newman, who finished second at Homestead and nearly took home his first title.
Truex has managed an average finish of 9.0 during the Chase — for comparison, three-time 2015 Chase winner Joey Logano‘s is 8.43 — but next to nobody is deeming the 78 team title-worthy.
Even The Chase Grid Battle Powered by Bing forecasts he’d be out of contention before the Eliminator Round, and only 59 percent of Chase Grid Battle players that made picks for Homestead have him advancing. Yet here we are.
Still, Truex is determined to improve on his finishes.
“I don’t think it’s good enough. I think we’ll need to improve for sure, unless we have some crazy stuff happen again in the next two weeks, which is highly unlikely,” Truex said. “I think, for us, I don’t think ninth will be good enough. I also think almost every race in the Chase besides Martinsville and Talladega, we’ve run better than we’ve finished and we need to change that. If we can finish the way we’ve been running, I think we’ll be in good shape. Texas and Phoenix are two good tracks for us. We tested out in Phoenix a month or so ago and we were really fast.
“For us, it’s really all about our expectations of ourselves and we’re going to be disappointed if we don’t perform at the level we know we’re capable of. We’ve got three to go and we’ll see what happens. We’re having fun with it and hopefully we can get the job done to the best of our abilities.”