Ryan Truex, Hattori Racing make their mark in Truck Series

When Ryan Truex ordered up the first batch of T-shirts to sell through his personal website, he did so as a lark. "I kind of made them as a joke, you know," he says now. But the simple design -- a self-penned rendering of his No. 16 truck with basic, lower-case text reading, "go ryan" -- caught on. Finding an unpaid endorser in NASCAR's Most Popular Driver certainly helped the cause. "Dale (Earnhardt) Jr. just ... I never paid him or gave him anything, he just decided he loved them and bought one and the rest is kind of history," Truex says. "He will randomly just tweet a picture of him wearing it and then I sell out instantly. It's been pretty crazy." The brisk apparel sales were just another head-turning aspect of a solid season for the 25-year-old Truex in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. After just missing out on the postseason, Truex landed his first two Keystone Light Pole Awards and finished ninth in the standings, highest among the non-playoff drivers. | Season recaps for Playoffs drivers Those were the latest strides made in his second season with Hattori Racing Enterprises, the upstart team fielded by Shigeaki Hattori, a longtime racer with a rich pedigree in open-wheel competition. With an uncertain offseason ahead of them, both Truex and Hattori enter 2018 wanting more. First steps Hattori, 54, first moved to the United States from his home country of Japan in 1995. He won twice in Indy Lights competition and later became a two-time entrant in the Indianapolis 500. But stock-car racing gradually drew his interest. Hattori made 10 Truck Series starts in the 2005 season before turning his attention to team ownership in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series. That developmental tour was where Truex first caught his eye, as the young driver secured back-to-back series championships in 2009-10. [caption id="attachment_95356" align="alignleft" width="214"] Shigeaki Hattori[/caption] But the two didn't become better acquainted until the weeks before the 2016 season, when they struck a late deal for a partial Truck Series schedule. "Over the past few years, I've gotten to know him pretty well and see his passion for racing and for NASCAR, and how much desire he has to be a successful team owner," Truex said. "He does it because he loves it. He's dedicated, honestly, most of his life to making his team work, run well and be successful. When he's not in America, he's in Japan trying to sell sponsorship and keep all his partners happy. And when he is here in the U.S., he's at the shop every single day in his office. "I swear he works like 20-hour days. I don't think he ever sleeps. He's all in. He's very passionate about it, and when you have a guy like that believe in you, it says a lot." Their first race together had an immediate yield -- a runner-up finish in the 2016 season opener at Daytona International Speedway. But that was the only top-five effort in their partial schedule; HRE used seven different crew chiefs in a 15-race season as it tried to find its way. This season, with veteran Scott Zipadelli calling the shots atop the pit box for the duration, Truex and Hattori found their rhythm. The plucky single-truck outfit benefited from that much-needed chemistry, making inroads against the series' larger teams, such as Kyle Busch Motorsports, ThorSport Racing and GMS Racing. "I think coming into the season, we were looked at as an underdog, for sure. But as the season went on, I felt like we became another top team," Truex says. "We weren't really looked at as underdogs; we were looked at as guys you had to race to win, and we started to prove that. ... "Honestly, I feel like we kind of exceeded our own expectations. I know we didn't win, but came awful close and I think proved a lot of people wrong who kind of wrote us off at the beginning of the year. That feels good." Brotherly vibe Truex's other popular T-shirt seller riffs off his bond with his brother Martin Truex Jr., who sealed his first Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series title this season. The shirt reads: "Ryan Truex Jr." with a red 'X' over the "Jr." The item description on his website is direct: "That's not my name." Forgive the TV announcers who first pegged him as a Junior out of reflexive habit, this after multiple seasons of using the suffix with his brother, who is 12 years his elder. "It just kind of started, and now people just say it because they think it's funny," the younger Truex says. "It makes for a good T-shirt, so it's all right." Unnecessary suffix or not, Ryan Truex doesn't seem to mind the closer connection to his brother, who has tallied up a dozen victories in the last two seasons, including a series-high eight this year in his dominant march to his first crown in NASCAR's top division. [caption id="attachment_95421" align="alignright" width="300"] Martin Truex Jr., left, and brother Ryan Truex, ,right, talk on the grid at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.[/caption] Though the two brothers compete in different national NASCAR circuits, Martin Truex Jr. has helped his brother with advice when their paths cross at a given event. Plus, there's a carryover effect in seeing a family member go on such a tear. "The biggest thing with Martin is his confidence level these last two or three years has just been through the roof," Ryan Truex says. "I think that mentality and that attitude rubs off on people. I know it helped me a lot. He would come by the hauler during the race weekend and when he talks, people listen. When he has opinions or things he thinks we should do, or even if it's something as simple as a bump or a groove on the race track where I need to do something different, everybody's all ears and willing to listen to him. "That's definitely been a huge help this season for me as well. It's definitely good motivation to see how successful he's been. Yeah, he knows his stuff. He's got a lot of experience and has been to all these race tracks and knows what it takes to win." Looking forward The close of the 2017 season may not be that distant a memory, but the planning phase for next year is already underway. Both Hattori and Truex sound hopeful that those plans involve each other, but the search for sponsors and the prospects for expanding HRE to a two-truck operation aren't yet final. Hattori said he hopes to firm up the organization's 2018 plans with something to announce by mid-January. Growing to a two-truck team would be a large undertaking, but one that Hattori says would better position the group for success. "It's really difficult with only one program to compete with those big teams, and I ideally want to make it two programs and then we can share data," Hattori says. "Especially now, we only have two or three days for testing in the season, so it's really important during practice time if we can run two trucks and share data, it would definitely help both programs." RELATED: Ryan Truex career statistics For the time being, the clock is ticking toward Daytona's Speedweeks in February and the start of the season. Reaching 11th-hour agreements doesn't seem to phase Truex; he's used to the concept. "Honestly, my whole NASCAR career has kind of been last-minute deals," Truex says. "Even the past two years with Shige, we hadn't really had anything signed or announced until late January. I feel like I've still got a little bit of time here to work. My obvious goal is the Cup Series, and regardless, Shige's done a whole lot to help me get there and has played a huge part in my career, for sure. We're doing everything we can to make things happen, but it's definitely a sponsorship-driven deal. It's going to take some funding and that's what we're working on now." Last year's performance, Truex says, went a long way toward attracting potential backers. The team wound up in the top five in more than a third of the 23 Camping World Truck Series races last year, and it placed in the top 10 in more than half. The campaign included a particularly hot stretch from July into September, when Truex logged top-five results in five events in a six-race span, leading multiple laps at Mosport, Chicagoland and New Hampshire. It's enough to make folks take notice, even if he still gets called Ryan Truex Jr. from time to time. "All those mega-teams, it's just so hard to compete with them. We proved it's possible to do it with less money and less resources and equipment," Truex says. "We definitely exceeded expectations all around -- our own and everybody else's. I think that's worth something. This team didn't exist two years ago, so I think that says a lot about how far we were able to come in such a short time."