Fifteen years ago, NASCAR driver Martin Truex Jr. came onto
the racing scene with high expectations, debuting full time as a heralded young
driver with Dale Earnhardt Inc. and being talked up as one of the next great
drivers.
اضافة اعلان
Yet whether it was the broken shifters, blown engines or
devastating pit road penalties that ended his race day or his very teams
folding beneath him, threatening his entire career, Truex, 40, managed to reach
Victory Lane only twice in his first decade in NASCAR’s top series.
Over the last five seasons, however, Truex has driven
himself from career letdown to a probable Hall of Famer and one of the most
successful American race car drivers ever, ranking 30th in career wins.
Since 2015, no driver has led more laps than Truex, and only
Kevin Harvick has taken home more checkers.
Truex has quietly and patiently, as has always been his
nature, become one of the most dominant drivers in the sport. He has won on
short tracks, on mile-and-a-half tracks, and on road courses, but he has not
won on the sport’s high-banked superspeedways like Talladega or Daytona, where
he is racing Sunday in the season-opening Daytona 500.
It will be his 17th attempt.
He placed second at the 2016 Daytona 500, losing to Denny
Hamlin by .01 of a second, the smallest margin of victory (or defeat, from
Truex’s perspective) in the race’s long history.
“Everywhere we go, he has a chance to win,” said Joe Gibbs,
the Hall of Fame football coach and the owner of Truex’s current team. “And
there are not a lot of guys like that.”
All the while, Truex has coped with a deeply personal
challenge: Sherry Pollex, his longtime girlfriend, has battled ovarian cancer
first diagnosed in 2014. She improved after aggressive treatment, but late last
year Pollex announced the disease had come back.
For Truex, standing by his partner’s side while she endured
yet another surgery and more rounds of chemotherapy is as much a part of life
as strapping on his helmet and climbing into the cockpit of his race car.
Cancer, he said, “is what we live all the time.”
“But you learn to understand what matters most and not worry
about the stuff that doesn’t matter,’’ he added.
His boss put it more succinctly.
“He’s gone through so much,” Gibbs said.
Truex tries not to think in the long term.
With a mentality that has been honed as both a world-class
race car driver and a partner to someone in the fight of her life, Truex tends
to focus on the world right through his windshield: his next race, Pollex’s
next treatment, and maybe, if he’s fast enough, hoisting a second Cup Series
championship come November.
He’s not thinking about retirement, nor is he worried about
his place in his sport’s history.
“I’ve never really thought much about a legacy or what my
career means,” Truex said. “The main thing right now is that I still love
racing, I love to compete, and I love to win.”
Now, as he nears the twilight of a career full of highs and
lows, Truex is focused on the task at hand; to win the Daytona 500, to rack up
more victories, and to once again find himself in Victory Lane at season’s end,
dedicating another championship to his girlfriend as the metallic green ticker
tape fills the air.
It would be the culmination of a career born in a small town
near the Jersey Shore, far from the epicenter of stock-car racing in the South.
He was introduced to racing by his father, a racer who had
made a name for himself regionally on what was then called the Busch North
Series.
To finance his racing, Martin Truex Sr. worked on clamming
boats, eventually starting a commercial clamming company.
“Racing was a hobby,” Truex said of his father’s racing
career. “He always had to pay for everything himself.”
Just like his father, Truex worked on his family’s boat as a
teenager to earn money to buy car parts for his races at nearby Wall Stadium, a
one-third-kilometer paved oval track where he learned to drive a race car.
He quickly rose through stock car racing’s lower ranks
before making his full time Cup Series debut in 2006.
Truex’s first win came soon after, in 2007, at Dover
International Speedway in Delaware.
Then, season after season, Truex failed to find a formula
that worked.
He left the Earnhardt team at the end of the 2009 season to
drive the No. 56 car for Michael Waltrip Racing. But after Truex won only once
in 2013, the team folded.
Without a car to drive, Truex thought his career, and thus
his lifelong dream, might be over.
But a ride popped up in Barney Visser’s Colorado-based
Furniture Row Racing team and, after brief negotiations, Truex signed on to
drive the No. 78 car.
Little was expected of the team, a one-car anomaly and the
only race team not based in or around Charlotte, North Carolina.
After a disastrous 2014 campaign, while much of Truex’s
focus was trained on his girlfriend’s health, the pieces began to fall into
place.
In 2017, a year and a half removed from his historically
close Daytona 500 loss to Hamlin, after a season that found him in Victory Lane
eight times, Truex hoisted the silver NASCAR Cup trophy on a warm night at
Homestead-Miami Speedway, the season’s champion-crowning finale.
It was a race he needed to win outright to become the
season’s champion.
As Truex took his victory lap, the in-car camera showed him
wiping tears from his eyes, his voice wobbling with emotion as he thanked his
pit crew over the radio.
Moments later, as the ticker tape littered Victory Lane and
with the tears still welling, he publicly recognized Pollex, likening the
three-hour fight he had just endured in his car to the fight that they had
endeavored together.
“A lot of it was for her,” Truex said. “We just never gave
up, all day long.”
It was the highest point in a career marked by so many lows,
so many close calls, and so many almosts.
After coming one position short of winning back-to-back
championships in 2018, Furniture Row Racing announced it would cease
operations.
Truex soon signed with Joe Gibbs Racing and has since been
driving the No. 19 car, in which he has won eight races over the last two
years.
Gibbs credits Truex’s mild manner for much of his success
behind the wheel.
“What impresses you is how even Martin’s personality is away
from the racetrack,” Gibbs said. “That carries over into the race car and
really helps him because he can think his way through problems really easy.
“He always keeps thinking, keeps working, keeps fighting.”
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