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NASCAR

Martin Truex Jr. leads firs lap of Daytona 500, hopes for win

By SceneDaily.com

Feb 15, 2009

Martin Truex Jr. isn’t looking forward to racing in the Daytona 500.

Well, that’s not exactly true. He isn’t looking forward to the style of restrictor-plate racing. And it’s not that he doesn’t like the draft, it’s about what he has to do in the draft.

“It’s kind of cut-throat, it’s kind of every man for himself, it’s kind of like you have to [anger] everybody around you sometimes,” said the polesitter for the race today at Daytona International Speedway. “I worry about what other people are thinking. I worry about when you’ve got to make a move and leave a guy hanging that had just pushed you past five cars.

“I always get kind of a guilty conscious when it comes to leave somebody in the draft or cut somebody off or block. I hate blocking. I can’t stand to do it, but you’ve got to do it to be successful.”

Truex led the series' first lap Sunday at Daytona, an event that could kick off a dramatic season for the driver who has always been associated with the Earnhardt team.

Winning two Busch Series championships driving for Chance 2 Motorsports (owned by Teresa Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr.), Truex moved full time to the Cup level in 2006 at Dale Earnhardt Inc.

He won his first race and made the Chase in 2007 amid all the craziness surrounding Earnhardt Jr.’s contract negotiations and eventual departure to Hendrick Motorsports.

He was the driver DEI hoped would establish a new identity to the company last year, but he didn’t win, his team got socked with a 150-point penalty in the middle of the year, they didn’t make the Chase and wound up 15th in points. In the middle of it all, Truex signed a one-year extension to his contract through 2009.

The team eventually partnered with Chip Ganassi Racing to form Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing.

In his first time out under the new banner, Truex won the pole. That didn’t come as too much of a surprise, considering DEI took the front row at Daytona last July.

“It was tough sometimes, not knowing exactly what was going on, not having control of anything and just kind of being along for the ride,” Truex said. “In the end, I thought everything worked out better than I thought it was going to.

“Anytime people are changing stuff, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out and change is usually one of those things that always sounds bad until you actually see the changes and see how everything went.”

So far, so good. But it remains to be seen whether two organizations that didn’t make the Chase and didn’t win a race last year can improve enough to change that trend.

“I expect to win, get back to victory land and I expect to [make] the Chase – both things that we should have done last year and didn’t,” Truex said. “It’s pretty simple really.

“I think they [at Ganassi] bring a different approach than we’ve had. I think they’re more engineered-driven as far as their race cars go and working on them and building them. The biggest thing I think is just bringing together two groups of people that have done things differently for a long time. I think we’re going to have more ideas flowing. Everybody is going to look at things differently. The more ideas you have, the better ones you can come up with. I just think that’s going to be a big key for us.”

Truex doesn’t plan on changing his style too much and he doesn’t want his team to change its style of remaining fairly even-keeled no matter the situation.

He hopes his contract situation – it is up again after this season – doesn’t become a distraction. He hopes to know what he’s doing in 2010 earlier in the season than last year, when he made his decision in August but still felt rushed into making a choice.

Truex insists he doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

“As of right now, I don’t have a clue,” Truex said. “It’s only fair that I have to keep giving it my all and hope things could be great.

“We could win five races in the next couple of months and things could be great. Right now, it’s too early to tell.”

Team co-owner and managing partner Chip Ganassi said he would like to keep Truex in the organization, but it’s too early to tell what will happen, especially in this economy.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ganassi said. “There were a lot of fast friends over the winter in NASCAR and in some sense, I’m just getting to know Martin. I think it would be premature for me to start discussing his contract or what he thought. I’m still trying to remember his phone number right now.”

As Ryan Newman’s Daytona 500 proved last year, a win in the sport’s biggest race doesn’t guarantee the season will go well and doesn’t translate into a contract extension.

To win the Daytona 500, though, is much like a negotiation process.

Truex learned that again Thursday in the 150-mile Gatorade Duel race as he led 32 laps but saw eventual winner Jeff Gordon take the lead from him on lap 38. About 11 laps later, Truex was in the pack, ended up spinning and wound up 21st.

“I let Gordon get by me when I could have blocked me but I didn’t,” Truex said. “Ultimately, it cost me the win.”

A win today “would be huge,” Truex said. It looks just as possible now as it did before the merger of the two organizations.

“All throughout the winter, that was one thing that was separate from all the other stuff that was going on, with the moving and the merging and all the talk about everything else, we still had the cars being built,” Truex said.

“With the motors coming from [Earnhardt-Childress Racing Technologies], we knew we were going to be up to par. … It’s been a great week so far.”