Martin Truex Jr. hoping to double down on early-season win at Phoenix Raceway

By Bob Pockrass
FOX Sports NASCAR Writer

PHOENIX — Martin Truex Jr. can look at the win column and think he has as good a shot as any of the four NASCAR Cup Series championship contenders Sunday at Phoenix Raceway.

But a season of inconsistency — his four wins rank him second among the four drivers, but his 12 top-5s and 19 top-10s are the least — puts the Joe Gibbs Racing driver in a unique position as the driver who won the most recent race at Phoenix but is not considered a favorite to repeat that feat to win the championship.

The 2017 Cup champion doesn’t necessarily have to win Sunday. He just has to finish ahead of the three other championship contenders: Kyle Larson (nine wins this year), Chase Elliott (two wins and the defending Cup champion who won the race at Phoenix a year ago) and Denny Hamlin (two wins and the best active driver who hasn't won a title).

"That was the best car I’ve ever had here in my whole career," Truex said Thursday in Phoenix. "The car felt really good. It did a lot of really good things. If we can make it happen again and hopefully have even more speed, we’re going to be tough to handle."

Those can be big ifs, and while a parts freeze for the season has curtailed some development, Truex said it isn’t a plug-and-play deal as far as taking the setup from March and applying it to November.

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NASCAR is using a different resin to help the cars have grip in the upper grooves to give drivers options of which groove to use, rather than just relying on the lower lane on the 1-mile track. The resin for the Phoenix weekend is designed to decrease the potential for buildup of small, marble-like chunks of tire, which can impact a car’s handling. That should create a better second groove, giving drivers more ability to pass.

The temperatures at Phoenix will be about 15 degrees warmer this weekend than they were in March, which could impact the horsepower the engines generate, as well as making the track more slick. NASCAR also is having practice and qualifying throughout the weekend, which it didn’t do in March.

"The track is going to be different," Truex said. "You’ve got to go out there and practice and do what you always do, and that is use your best guess, intuition, your feel, your gut and engineering and all those things going into it, and hopefully mash it all together and come out with a winning car on Sunday."

Truex said he doesn’t believe the car he will race is the same one he drove in March.

"To say the cars [setup] are the same [as March] is not true," Joe Gibbs Racing competition director Wally Brown said. "We've learned things.

"There's been other rule updates. We've had to make changes."

NASCAR became stricter on elements of the noses of the cars around the middle of the year, and it is not rare for NASCAR to emphasize different areas of the inspection process as a season evolves.

But it can’t be ignored that Truex won not only in March at Phoenix but also in September at Richmond, a flat track that is just a quarter-mile shorter than Phoenix and one at which NASCAR brings the same tire compound as Phoenix. That shows that JGR built on the Phoenix victory earlier in the season and adapted.

"We do have some good notes, and we do feel good about it," Brown said of returning to Phoenix. "I feel like we made a good point to do a lot of work after that first race, prepare for some things for the fall to be prepared.

"I feel good about it, but also I felt good about this race last year heading into it, and we didn't fare out too well."

Last year, Truex finished 10th in the championship race but had already been knocked out of the playoffs. JGR’s only contending driver was Hamlin, who finished a disappointing fourth.

"It’s a big opportunity," Truex said of Sunday. "To race for a championship is what we work all year for. ... Whoever has the best car, the best setup, the best day and puts it all together.

"It’s four great teams, four great drivers."

Truex has the confidence without all the pressure. He has a championship trophy on his mantle and has had a season that could be characterized as championship-caliber, but not one that would suggest a driver should win the title.

"We know we have a great shot at it," said Truex, who has many of the same team members as when he won the title at Furniture Row Racing. "But we don't have the weight of the world on our shoulders. We've done this before. We've been here before. We understand what it takes.

"Honestly, we're enjoying it. We're having fun, and we're looking forward to going out there and doing the best job we can this weekend and just going out there and winning it."

Bob Pockrass has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s. He joined FOX Sports in 2019 following stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @bobpockrass.