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KANSAS CITY, Kan. — The most disappointed man in Kansas Saturday night was Martin Truex Jr.
He forced a smile as he climbed from his Furniture Row Racing Toyota, but there was disappointment in his eyes.
“It sucks. I don’t know what you want me to say,” Truex responded as members of the media crowded him back against his car on pit road. “It’s not fun to lead all those laps and come up 14th. I wish the race was longer. We were hunting them down quick at the end.”
On a warm night at Kansas Speedway, Truex dominated the GoBowling 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race, only to see a broken bolt on a rear wheel strip a potential victory from his grasp.
After leading 172 of the first 211 laps, Truex headed to pit road as a late cycle of green-flag pit stops got underway. But as soon as he headed back out onto the track, he said, he knew something was amiss.
“I knew right away,” he said. “It was shaking.”
His first thought?
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it.
“The wheel was on tight, but it was crooked because there was something jammed behind it.”
It wasn’t the fault of his crew, he said, but rather a funky, how-could-that happen occurrence.
Forced back to pit road to correct the problem, the three-time winner returned to the track once more, this time buried deep in the field, 20th and one lap down.
Able to regain the lost lap, Truex began working his way back through the field as the final 50 laps of the 267-lap race played out. By Lap 255 he was 17th but could only get back inside the top 15 before fellow Toyota driver Kyle Busch (Joe Gibbs Racing) was flagged the race winner.
“You always know there’s the possibility of those things happening; you just hope they are earlier in the race and you can overcome them,” Truex said. “We certainly had a car fast enough that we could have overcome that if it was earlier. We just ran out of time there at the end.”
It was the second race this season that Truex had led the most laps but failed to come away with the victory. He led 141 at Texas Motor Speedway but finished sixth. He began the season with a second-place finish to Denny Hamlin (JGR) in the Daytona 500, losing by .010 second.
Busch’s winning car rumbled slowly by as Truex calmly continued to answer questions. Team owner Joe Gibbs, whose organization supplies the pit crew for Furniture Row, as well as providing technical support, stopped by after checking with the crew to try and explain the unexplainable to the driver.
“I swear, you watch guys win races that don’t have the fastest car or on fuel mileage and all this stuff and it’s like, ‘Damn,’ ” Truex said. “Someday I’m going to get on one of those or (be) on the other side of one of them.
“Usually you can dominate and win, but it’s tough and it happens. It’s part of racing.”
The Furniture Row Racing team, which advanced to the Championship Round with Truex last season at Homestead-Miami Speedway, switched from Chevrolet to Toyota before the 2016 season. That ended an alliance with Richard Childress Racing and began one with JGR.
This week’s pole winner has been a force through the first segment of the season, but Victory Lane has continued to elude the 35-year-old.
Crew chief Cole Pearn could only shrug his shoulders afterward. “We run the same stuff every week,” he said. “We’ve never had a problem and randomly when you’re leading you get that. So … whatever.
“You just have to put it behind you. Heck, it’s kind of laughable at this point. We just do our homework, figure out what happened and go get them next week. That’s all we can do.”
The setback cost Truex, a native of Mayetta, New Jersey, only one spot in the points standings — he’s now 10th and headed to Dover International Speedway next week, his “hometown” track.
“It’s hard when you give them away like that,” Truex said. “It’s hard to get cars that good in this series. … We’ll just keep trying, that’s all you can do. It’s a team sport, win and lose as a team.”
MORE: A day at the track
