SONOMA, Ca. — Martin Truex Jr. left no question of who had the dominant car, and as a driver who already had won three times in his career on the Sonoma Raceway road course, Truex couldn’t be beat Sunday.
The 2017 Cup champion earned his second victory of the season as he led 51 of the 110 laps including 27 of the final 31 on the 1.99-mile road course.
“It feels incredible to have a day like that, a run like that,” Truex said. “A team like I have, they’re doing everything right right now and it’s a lot of fun to drive these cars.”
Here are some takeaways from a day when Truex outsped Kyle Busch across the finish line, with Busch followed by Joey Logano, Chris Buescher and Chase Elliott.
A big, long turnaround
Joe Gibbs Racing, the anchor team for Toyota, struggled on road courses last year with NASCAR’s new Next Gen car, so to have Denny Hamlin on the pole and Truex winning was a signal of a turnaround.
“We’d show up at road courses, we would kind of outsmart ourselves, reinvent the wheel, come up with some super-crazy trick setup because we knew our cars were not as good as the other manufacturers,” Truex said about last season.
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NASCAR Cup Series: Toyota/Save Mart 350 Highlights
“We shot ourselves in the foot a few times. Here was one of them for sure. We came here, completely disregarded everything we know about this track thinking it was a new car, it was going to be different. We ran terrible. It was like, ‘OK that was dumb. We’re idiots.’”
Truex now leads the point standings after a season in which he went winless, and while he was among the top drivers in points, missed the playoffs because there were so many race winners.
In those situations, there is often a temptation to change personnel. Truex was adamant that JGR didn’t.
“I never thought we couldn’t win again,” Truex said. “We should have won a bunch of races last year. Even though our cars probably weren’t the best cars in the field, … I still felt like we should have won five or six races.
“We had some bad luck. We had some crazy things happen. That’s just racing. I don’t think anybody got down. That’s why my team is all the same still right now.”
A big, quick turnaround
Kyle Busch was not happy with his car in practice and started 12th Sunday. So he had reason to be somewhat satisfied with a second-place finish.
He was running around 10th when he caught a break when the caution came out on Lap 50. He was among the drivers who had most recently pitted so he could stay out and inherit the lead.
“We got a lucky break with that caution where it flip-flopped,” he said. “We were back in 10th-11th and just mired there and not going anywhere and then we got up to the front and we didn’t really do anything up front.
“We maintained. We were fast enough to maintain that track position.”
‘Just feels incredible to have a day like that!’ – Martin Truex Jr. talks about his emotions after winning the NASCAR Toyota/Save Mart 350
Few cautions
NASCAR changed the road-course rules this year to no longer have cautions at the stage breaks. At most of the road courses, there tend to be plenty of cautions, especially late as the race becomes chaotic.
But Sonoma Raceway doesn’t feature a hairpin turn that would cause drivers to push and shove. And with NASCAR’s Next Gen car (introduced last year) having a different transmission that lends itself to easier maneuverability on road courses, the drivers don’t tend to lose control as often as they did in the past.
“Sometimes guys actually race a little bit smart and don’t dive-bomb and make crazy maneuvers to try to make a spot because they know that it is so equal that you have to knock somebody out of the way to get by him,” Busch said.
Sunday’s race featured just two cautions — one for a loose wheel on pit road and the other for a Denny Hamlin wreck.
“This is the best road course we’ve got,” Logano said. “The restarts, we can work two-wide because there are a lot of flowing corners.
“When you go to a Chicago or a COTA, you know it’s going to be a disaster because it’s going into a heavy braking zone right off the bat.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including the past 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass, and sign up for the FOX Sports NASCAR Newsletter with Bob Pockrass.
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