Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
Coming off an 18th place finish at Martinsville Speedway last week, Martin Truex Jr. is looking for a redemption finish this weekend at Texas Motor Speedway.
“I love it, it’s great – Texas is a great track,” he said.
This year’s event marks the first-time that the Cup Series drivers will use the low-downforce package at Texas Motor Speedway. Paired with an aged surface, the drivers are looking forward to it based on how things went earlier this year.
“I think it’s going to be a lot of fun,” he said. “It’s similar to what we’ve seen in Atlanta and California. The tires really wear out on the long run and the pace gets really slow and you get moving around searching for grip all over the place. It’s my favorite kind of racing to do and I think it’s going to be a really good one.”
The Duck Commander 500 this weekend is a night race on Saturday April 9th, the first night race for the rules package. NASCAR is going with early qualifying and then later practice for Friday this race weekend.
“It’s going to be good to actually have night practice, or an evening practice for a night race which is something that we don’t normally have,” he said. “That a good change. The schedule is kind of odd, coming in for one practice today and then qualifying in the morning and then switch the car over after qualifying is going to be a big chore because we’re not going to have a lot of time. Its’ going to be tough on the crews, but having practice later, after XFINITY cars practice and having rubber on the race track is going to help us.”
Having practice for the race in a night scenario is a change for NASCAR.
“Typically a lot of our night races we practice in the heat of the day and just really have to take a guess to set up for night time,” he said. It will be interesting to see how that changes things.”
Truex is off to a solid start as the New Jersey native was runner-up in the season opening race at Daytona International Speedway for the Daytona 500 in February. He has since ran in the top-10 in the races following, showing speed on a weekly basis.
“I feel really good about where we’re at,” he said. “Obviously there were a lot of changes during the offseason going to Toyota and starting to work with JGR, using their chassis and things like that. We’ve had a lot of new things to figure out and I’ve been really pleased with the speed we’ve had, the job the team has done and feel like we’ve done a good job at those things. I am disappointed in where we are in points and our finishes. We’ve run better consistently every single race than we finish and that’s something we need to turn around. Last year we were really good at consistently finishing as good or better than we ran and this year we haven’t.”
The driver of the No. 78 Bass Pro Shops/TRACKER Boats Toyota Camry has 21 starts at Texas Motor Speedway with two top-five and 10 top-ten finishes and will look to add to these numbers this weekend.
