By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
Leading 675 laps in his last five starts at Richmond Raceway, a victory is bound to occur once in such a span of dreamy performance for Martin Truex Jr.
However, for the 26th time in his career, Truex was unable to close the deal at the Virginia 0.750-mile track after a pit mishap threw the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Toyota from the race lead to start the final stage of the night.
The mistake put Truex to the rear of the field after leading 163 laps and sweeping the stages in Saturday’s Federated Auto Parts 400.
At this point, Richmond may owe Truex a victory or two.
“If there’s one that does, it’s here, I can promise you that,” Truex said. “I don’t know what we’ve got to do to win one of these things. God, it’s awfully frustrating to come here and be so good and lead so many laps and find every single way possible that just things don’t work out for us.”
Similar to an issue at Darlington, the No. 78 could not leave pit road without a race-costing mistake. And in a race that saw only three cautions (two for stage breaks), opportunities were limited for Truex to make a comeback.
“You can’t beat a dead horse,” he said of pit road mistakes. “If you start yelling and screaming at them they’re just going to do worse the next stop. For me, I let Cole [Pearn, crew chief] and the guys in the pit handle it. I just do all I can do behind the wheel to get back to the front. That’s all you can do.”
But the night was far from over. It took a while but Truex was back in the top five in the closing 40 laps and jumped to a third-place finish at the checkered flag. Ironically, the pit crew aided Truex’s comeback.
“It was a good recovery,” he said. “Their stops after that were all good. We had a new front changer this week and thought he did a really good job. Aside from the penalty, we were probably the fastest we’ve been on pit road in a while.
“That’s really encouraging. We’ll take a mistake here when it doesn’t count and hope they get it cleaned up, and we’ll move forward and really just have fast, clean pit stops.”
With back-to-back third-place finishes in the two playoff races, Truex is locked into the Round of 12 based off points. However, the sting of losing with a winning car lasts the rest of the night.
“It’s pretty frustrating, but at the same time, it feels good to run that good,” he said. “And we recovered well and did what we came here to do, which is move on to the next round.
“I wish we would have been in Victory Lane right now, but in a few days I guess the pain will go away a little bit and we’ll be able to go to the Roval and have some fun with no pressure.”