No. 78 places third, carries momentum from Michigan
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BROOKLYN, Mich. — Martin Truex Jr. almost made the most of Sunday’s rainy race day at Michigan International Speedway, aiming for his second straight NASCAR Sprint Cup Series victory on the heels of the previous weekend’s Pocono breakthrough. Instead, a brush with NASCAR royalty and continued momentum were respectable consolation prizes.
Truex finished third in Sunday’s rain-shortened Quicken Loans 400, failing to lead a lap for the first time in a five-race span. But the streak associated with his strong start to 2015 became a historic one. With Sunday’s result, Truex became the first driver to post 14 top-10 finishes in the season’s first 15 races since King Richard Petty in 1969.
“Just missed it a little bit today, but really proud of our season, really proud to have obviously my name mentioned next to Richard Petty,” Truex said. “The King is pretty special, so thankful for my team and what they’ve done this year, and hopefully we’ll keep this thing rolling.”
Momentum, as it pertained to the race itself, was difficult to achieve. The multiple starts and stops for periodic rain showers resulted in four red flags and more caution laps than green-flag laps in the opening 50 circuits. Even with the interruptions, Truex had moved all the way from his ninth-place starting spot to second in the running order.
But in Truex’s mind, the race turned for the Furniture Row Racing No. 78 Chevrolet team and crew chief Cole Pearn during their first pit stop. When the yellow flew for a competition caution on Lap 40, Truex entered the pits in second place but left in seventh as the crew waited to get extra fuel in the tank. Truex lined up on the less-advantageous inside row for that restart and subsequent ones, halting his progress until the latter stages of the race.
Measuring progress through the handful of brief rain delays wasn’t an easy task. Pearn has been an integral part of Furniture Row’s rise in his first season as a Sprint Cup crew chief, but for all his early signs of pit-box savvy, he’d never quite seen anything like the soggy Sunday in Michigan’s Irish Hills.
“It’s got to be the weirdest race I’ve ever been a part of, that’s for sure,” Pearn said. “As many caution laps as we ran, the strategy kept changing. I felt like we did right at the end there, which it either could’ve gone green or could’ve restarted on the front row or fourth, I think we could’ve had a shot to win.
“I felt like the car was good enough, but it’s really hard to know. The pace was up and down — some runs were really slow and then it picked back up at the end there, so it was all over the map.”
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For Truex, the rain delays posed less of an impact on strategy than they did on his focus.
“More than anything it’s just a pain in the butt,” Truex said. “I mean, you get in there, you get ready to go, and you’re like, all right, here we come, getting ready to go green, and it’s raining again. It’s just a pain in the butt. Once you get in the car and get the helmet on and get mentally prepared, you’re ready to go, it’s kind of just a big letdown when you’ve got to stop and get out of the car again.
“More than anything, we just want to get out there and get racing and put on a good show and then get to go home and spend some time there.”
Circumstances — whether rain- or restart-related — didn’t fall in favor of the Furniture Row outfit with the same alignment that they did at Pocono Raceway. But the team gets to carry the headway from another top-five finish back to its Colorado home base with an idle week for the series coming up.
“I really felt like we had a good car capable of winning the race today; we just didn’t really have the track position to show it, having to stay on the bottom as much as we did,” Pearn said. “But that’s just the way it went. Still good to keep the momentum going and have something we can continue to build off of.”