Truex Jr. finds on-track motivation in family life

“I’ve finished second a lot in my career,” Truex said, with a grin. “But this feels good and it’s better than third … or 30th.”

And the very fact Truex is shooting higher than a runner-up effort shows how far this single-car team has come in a year.

Truex’ debut with the Furniture Row Racing Team included winning the outside pole for the 2014 Daytona 500 but he finished last in the race and it proved a harbinger of things to come. He scored five top-10s but had 11 finishes of 25th or worse and led only one lap on the season after contending for a Chase bid a year earlier with Michael Waltrip Racing.

This year he started 10th and finished eighth in the Daytona 500 and answered that last week at Atlanta with a sixth-place finish. His runner-up at Las Vegas equals a runner-up finish in the non-points paying Sprint Unlimited race at Daytona in February and he also finished fifth in his Daytona 500 qualifying race.

And Truex is fourth in the Sprint Cup Series championship standings, only five points behind Daytona 500 winner Joey Logano entering next week’s race in Phoenix.

Truex could only shake his head when asked to describe the difference between the start of 2015 and the disappointment of 2014.

“You can’t describe it,” he said. “When things aren’t going good, you have to just keep on going and going, and working and working harder.

“It’s no different than what Sherry was going through. You find out what people are made of when they’re down,” Truex said, referring to his longtime girlfriend Sherry Pollex, who has undergone treatment for ovarian cancer in the past year.

“After seeing all that and being a part of that, its was like, a bad year in the race car, that’s nothing.

Caring for Pollex through her difficult treatment and watching her will to persevere and strength to overcome has affected Truex greatly and inspired him mightily.

It has given him a new perspective and re-defined what it means to “never give up.”

“When you get a glimpse of something that could possibly change your life like that in a bad way, it makes you look at things a lot differently,” Truex said. “Suddenly those bad days at the race track weren’t so bad. Suddenly they were okay and I knew that if we just kept working hard, we could get through it all and certainly I feel like we have now.

“But we’re going to continue to work hard and try to get to that next level. We want to win races. We have got a great team. We have got good equipment right now and it’s important when you’re in those positions to try to take advantage of that.”

Truex was quick to credit some major offseason changes for the early season results. He has a new crew chief, Cole Pearn, and says the team’s technical alliance with Richard Childress Racing is maturing and paying off, as is simply having a year under his belt with the FRR team.

Third-place finisher Ryan Newman, a RCR driver and sixth-place finisher, JTG Daugherty Racing driver A.J. Allmendinger are part of that RCR alliance.

“Just getting more experience together, getting more confidence in each other and really just having a better game plan going into the season is a big part of the reason why the cars are running better and all the teams seem to be running closer together,” Truex said.

Asked if the rules changes to the cars may have played a role in his reversal of fortune and lent itself more to his driving style, Truex said it was simpler than that.

“I attribute it to knowing what we were doing wrong last year and fixing it over the winter time and coming out of the box kind of understanding what we’re doing.

“The biggest thing I was proud of today or took way from it was we were off a little bit at the beginning of the race and worked on it all day long, continued to get better and at the end of the day we were the best we’ve been all day.”

He continued, “That’s what you like to see out of your team; you like to finish strong.

“Got a lot of momentum on our side right now and hopefully we can keep building on that, build some more momentum and hopefully we are able to catch that 4-car (Sunday’s race winner and points leader Kevin Harvick) in a couple weeks.”

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