Martin Truex Jr.’s Costly Mistake on Pit Road Leads to Early

Martin Truex Jr. will not ride off into the sunset as a two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion. The 44-year-old driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry XSE, who will retire from full-time NASCAR Cup Series competition at season’s end, saw his final NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs run come to an end in Saturday’s Bass Pro Shops Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway.In what was a microcosm of Truex’s, and the No. 19 team’s season, they had a lot of speed in Saturday night’s race evidenced by Truex being a top-10 contender for the entire opening 333 laps of the race, where he ran as high as second, but a mistake crushed any hopes of Truex advancing to the next round of the Playoffs.

On his final pit stop of the race, Truex was busted for speeding on pit road. As a result, he would drop to 26th on the Lap 336 restart, and he would never recover. Truex would end the night with a 24th-place finish, one lap off of the pace of race winner Kyle Larson.

After the race, Truex explained his pit road speeding penalty, which he believes occurred because of the line he took down Bristol Motor Speedway’s pit road.

READ MORE:Martina Navratilova gives Emma Raducanu harsh reality check

It’s really tough when it’s 0.09 miles per hour that screws up your whole chance at a good season up,” Truex anguished. “I don’t know how that happened. I didn’t know I was even that close, honestly. I felt like I did the same thing as every other stop. Sometimes you’re just a foot — maybe I was a foot to the left. It’s so tricky when you’re going from that curved section to the straight to get your lights.”

Ultimately, while he explained that it’s tricky to execute pit stops under caution at Bristol, due to NASCAR requiring drivers to travel down the frontstretch and backstretch pits as well as on the apron in Turns 3 and 4 as an effort to reduce the advantage of pitting on the frontstretch over the backstretch under yellow flag conditions, Truex shouldered the blame.

“And it’s on me, obviously. It’s my mistake,” Truex admitted. “They said we were going to have to run second or third there to have a chance [to advance to the Playoffs], and I don’t know if we could have done it, but it would have been nice to see.