Martin Truex Jr. led the most laps in Saturday night’s Federated Auto Parts 400 but he came up short of a first career Richmond Raceway win again.
Truex Jr. led a race-high 163 laps but was forced to settle for third behind race winner Kyle Busch and runner-up Kevin Harvick. It was the fourth time in the last five Richmond races Truex Jr. has led the most laps but yet the Furniture Row Racing driver has yet to visit Victory Lane.
“I don’t know what we’ve got to do to win one of these things,” Truex Jr. said. “God, it’s awful frustrating to come here and be so good and lead so many laps and find every single way possible that just things don’t work out for us. It’s pretty frustrating.
“But at the same time, it feels good to run that good, and we recovered well and did what we came here to do, which is move on to the next round.”
A penalty for an uncontrolled tire put Truex Jr. in a hole he had to fight back from. Despite the mishap, Truex Jr. is putting the incident behind him and the team and looking ahead to the rest of the playoffs.
“Yeah, you’ve just got to move on from it,” he said. “You can’t beat a dead horse. If you start yelling and screaming at them they’re just going to do worse the next stop. For me, I let Cole and the guys in the pit handle it. I just do all I can do behind the wheel to get back to the front. That’s all you can do.
“Like I said, it was a good recovery. Their stops after that were all good. We had a new front changer this week and thought he did a really good job. Aside from the penalty, we were probably the fastest we’ve been on pit road in a while.”
The good news is Truex Jr. did clinch a spot in the second round, which takes off some of the pressure competing at Charlotte Motor Speedway’s Roval next week.
“I wish we would have been in Victory Lane right now, but in a few days I guess the pain will go away a little bit and we’ll be able to go to the Roval and have some fun with no pressure,” he laughed.
