MARTIN TRUEX, No. 78 Bass Pro Shops/TRACKER Boats Toyota Camry, Furniture Row Racing
What happened with the roof flap?
“I don’t know. Apparently, it’s sticking up too much.”
Will you just move on from the roof flap issue?
“Yeah, what’s the alternative? You figure out what went wrong, you fix it and move forward. It’s just a small setback – not a big deal. I mean, it’s just for starting position for a qualifying race, so I mean – maybe if it was starting for the 500, it’d be a bigger deal or something, but hopefully they don’t come down too hard on us and we’ll be able to move past it.”
What is your relationship with Cole Pearn like?
“Yeah, he’s an incredibly guy. He’s done obviously an awesome job with our team and I’m super lucky to have him as my crew chief and just really proud of what he accomplished last year. I have a lot of confidence in him obviously after what we did, but just the way he blossomed last year. He came from an engineering role and he was pretty laid back and he was pretty quiet. He didn’t really get in the middle of a whole lot of things and then last year when he got the call to take over the team, he was a different person and he just – he really fit well into that role and embraced it and took the reins of the team and went in the direction he thought was right and just great racing background, really understands the sport and all it takes to be competitive and just his work ethic is incredibly. He’ll do whatever it takes and these guys believe in him and in that and they follow suit, so he makes for a great leader and a smart guy.”
Do you have a new strategy for 2016?
“I don’t think we’ll really do anything differently. I think there was a few areas we felt like we needed to be better in – a few areas where we felt like we could be stronger and a lot of that stuff is on the technical side and the car side and certainly being a Toyota team and our relationship with JGR (Joe Gibbs Racing), we feel like – Cole (Pearn, crew chief) feels like we’re stronger in every area than we were last year and that’s something in the off-season that we were looking forward to. He feels really good about where we are on that side of things and he feels good and I do as well. He gives me a lot of confidence and we’re really just looking forward to getting out there and getting the season started, kind of see where we stand and how things are working, what we need to work on and focus on. Hopefully, we’ll have some speed out of the gate and we can kind of fine tune from there.”
How did you end up writing the story about your girlfriend’s cancer?
“We just wanted to tell our story really and I think the biggest reason is Sherry (Pollex, girlfriend) is done with her treatment, she’s feeling good, she’s healthy and it’s kind of time to switch gears to the awareness. She’s going to kind of be a spokesperson for the disease and she wants to help other people and spread the word about it and try to get more funding for research and all those type of things, so it was kind of a good time to get our story out there, explain how it went and kind of get the ball rolling on what we’re going to try and do as far as the awareness side and the research side about trying to help other women and other people with this disease. Obviously, Sherry is going to be a bigger part of that than I am just because of her personal experience and what she’s been through and how to deal with and how to manage it, how to eat – all the things that go along with trying to get healthy. Then on my side of it, it’s about kind of teaching husbands and sons and just whoever from the man’s point of view on how to deal with it, so we’ve kind of retooled our foundation a bit to focus on not only childhood cancer, which we’ve always done – pediatric cancer – but also now we’re going to put a lot of effort and emphasis in ovarian cancer, so all those things kind of go together and that was timing part of it. The rest was just – that was our story. That’s the story how it went for me and that’s how I wanted to get it out there. I think it hit home with a lot of people. A lot of people have unfortunately dealt with similar battles and it just kind of shows what we’ve been through.”
