Martin Truex Jr. is seeking to continue his streak of consecutive top-three finishes on the season in Saturday’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway and at the same time he’s looking to end another streak.
Truex is still winless at superspeedways – Daytona and Talladega – in the Cup Series, a streak that stands at 61 races. Daytona, which will hold the regular-season finale for the first time, has been the site of Truex’s best superspeedway finish – second in the 2016 Daytona 500 and the 2018 July race.
“It’s really hard to figure that place out at least for us and seems like we’re always in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Truex Jr. said. “Excited about it and fortunately we’re locked in so we don’t worry about it, but I can’t imagine being one of those bubble guys that’s got to be pretty stressful.”
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Superpseedway racing hasn’t been kind to Truex over the years that includes finishes of 20th or worse in 16 of his 30 starts at Daytona. Three of his last six starts at “The World Center of Racing” have resulted in DNFs.
“Honestly, it’s been a tough place for us to finish,” Truex said. “I think for me I feel like I tried the strategy of laying back and trying to be safe and all I’ve ever done by doing that is lost out on stage points and ended up being crashed anyway.”
Truex finished second in both races last weekend at Dover and will start second at Daytona. His nearest teammate, Denny Hamlin, will start 10th.
“For us we’re in and obviously we can just go race, but I think the riding around strategy for me is out the window and we’re just going to try to stay up front and hopefully be able to keep enough Toyota’s up there where we can be strong,” Truex said. “That’s really the key. We’ve seen the superspeedways come down to teammates and manufactures racing together and we’re way outnumbered on the Toyota side.
“I think if at all possible if you can stay in the top eight or 10, I think that’s the safest place to be but it’s easier said than done.”
Heading into the regular-season finale, Truex is the only driver to finish in the top 10 in the last seven races with his run of top-three finishes. Truex has one race win (Martinsville) and two stage wins this season for a current total of seven Playoff points.
“I feel like we are right where we need to be,” Truex Jr. said. “Obviously, we would love to have more bonus points, you know, more playoff points. We just missed out on a lot of those and you look at the last seven races with top-three finishes. You go back to two races before that probably should have won Kentucky. And I think without us getting crashed out at Texas we would be talking about nine in-a-row top three finishes.”
Motor Racing Network’s live coverage of Saturday’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona will begin at 6 p.m. ET. Truex Jr. will be one of the featured interviews in the pre-race show.
