This time, however, Truex and his No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team were able to rally from a near-disastrous pit strategy decision to finish a respectable ninth.
Surprisingly, it’s the best finish so far in seven playoff races for the driver and team which won the 2023 regular season championship. His previous best finish was 17th at Texas.
Truex’s trouble Sunday started early in Stage 2, when his crew chief James Small elected to have Truex stay on the track and inherit the lead rather than pit during the stage break like the rest of the field did.
When the race restarted, Truex was able to stay up front but after a few laps, he began drifting back in the field as those cars on new tires drove by.
The results didn’t sit well with Truex, who got into several tense radio exchanges with Small.
In one, after Truex described his car as “(expletive) terrible,” Small replied: “Sorry. We completely (expletive) that up.”
Truex replied, “I almost didn’t listen to you, but I’m not really good at that.” To which Small replied, “Yeah, you should not have listened clearly. We have no idea what we’re doing.”
For much of the remainder of the race buried in the field, Truex had difficulty making up positions on the track. On restarts in particular, he would lose positions before eventually being able to reclaim them.
“It was just trying to figure out how to minimize the damage and hope that we could get a longer run. We did at the end, which was really helpful,” Truex said of his late-race rally. “I don’t know what we had going on.
“Restarting up front, we were pretty good, and then on the long runs, really good – I thought – probably a third-place car, but once we got back there – 16th, 18th whatever it was – it was just really bad on the restart. I would lose three, four, five spots every time.
“Then, once we got strung out and got going, I would pick them off and work our way forward, but then we would get another caution and I would lose a couple more.”
Truex picked up considerable ground in the last 30 laps which led to his ninth-place finish and remains in the top four of points, holding a tenuous two-point advantage over his teammate Christopher Bell.
Two races remain in the semifinal round of the playoffs with Kyle Larson claiming one of the four spots in the Championship 4 thanks to his win Sunday.
“It was an uphill battle, but luckily at the end, we were able to have a couple of better restarts and at least maintain, and then work our way forward from there,” Truex said.
“All-in-all, it was okay. The pit call, obviously, killed us in Stage 2.”
