Martin Truex Jr. accepted a second-place finish in Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Kyle Busch dominated the night leading 377 of the 400 laps and Truex Jr. could only tip his cap to that performance as he finished second.
“At the end of the day, we ran second,” Truex Jr. said. “He kicked everybody’s tail. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how it is.”
Truex Jr. is no stranger to Coca-Cola 600 dominance as he led all but eight laps in winning the 2016 edition of the endurance race. He had to battle some challenges on pit road to stay in the hunt Sunday night just to finish second.
“Yeah, I mean, I thought it was a solid day overall,” he said. “Got caught speeding once, in one segment. I can’t wait to see the time. It couldn’t have been much. But I just hit some of those bumps a little bit wrong and got going a little too fast and tapped the brake just a split second too late. I typically don’t get a lot of speeding penalties, so (crew chief) Cole (Pearn) won’t ride my butt too hard this week about it.
“Aside from that, the pit gun deal, it was just one of those freak things. It reversed on him when he was hitting the fifth lug nut and he had to manually switch it back, so he lost some time, and then the uncontrolled tire deal. Just one of those nights, but they cleaned it up well and did a good job after that and was solid most every other stop. That’s all you can ask for. People make mistakes.”
So Truex Jr. will head to Pocono next week feeling confident about the direction of his race team after a second-place run at Charlotte given the circumstances.
“I feel like we’re in decent shape,” he said. “Still learning a little bit about the rules this year, the new splitter deal, the last four weeks I feel like has hurt us some and definitely made it more difficult to pass and come through traffic.
“Tonight was definitely a difficult test because of that, but I thought we were somewhat as fast as Kyle maybe on the short runs, just maybe not the long runs. So we’re not too far off, we just need to keep digging.”
