Martin Truex Jr.'s Bad Loss Overshadows Kyle Busch's Win in Wretched Kansas Race
It just seems like Kyle Busch has won every race. The reigning Sprint Cup champion has just won three of the 11 races run so far in NASCAR's premier series.
Sure, Busch won four Xfinity Series races and the only Camping World Truck Series race he entered. He also won a 150-mile qualifying race before the Daytona 500.
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It wasn't, however, Busch who made a mockery of the GoBowling.com 400. It was the unfortunate Martin Truex Jr. who led 172 out of 267 Kansas Speedway laps and had the race clinched until something called "a head bolt off the brake," well, broke during a pit stop on the 212th lap. Until Truex Jr. had to pit, he had led 81 percent of the laps.
Truex Jr., who wound up finishing 14th, was understandably mournful when he talked to Fox Sports after the race: "I couldn't believe it. Went around (Turns) 1 and 2 and I was like, 'Wheel's loose.'"
ESPN's Bob Pockrass commented on the incident on his Twitter account:
"I kept telling myself that maybe it's not me. Maybe it's just shaking because it has tape on it or something stupid," he added. "It was loose, and I knew it right away. Frustrating, but that's how it goes."
| Drivers | Career Races | Wins | Seconds | Top Fives |
| Kyle Busch | 401 | 37 | 34 | 139 |
| Kevin Harvick | 549 | 32 | 34 | 142 |
| Martin Truex Jr. | 380 | 3 | 9 | 41 |
It seems that, for every time Busch figures out a way to win, someone, and quite often Truex Jr., discovers a way to lose it.
This year, Truex Jr.'s Colorado-based Furniture Row Motorsports team switched manufacturers from Chevrolet to Toyota and gained access to technology and cars provided by Joe Gibbs Racing. Gibbs, in fact, referred to Truex Jr. as "our teammate" while discussing Busch's third Cup victory of the season and 37th of his career.
What does Truex Jr. have to show for it? He's had finishes of second, sixth, seventh and ninth and ranks 10th in the point standings.
"We're going to win races, for sure," Truex Jr. said to Fox Sports. "If we keep bringing cars like that, we're going to win some. It's frustrating when you've had it happen so many times in your career."
Truex Jr. also added:
"I swear, you watch guys win races that don't have the fastest car, or on fuel mileage and all this stuff, and it's like, damn. Someday I'm going to get on one of them or on the other side of one of them. Usually, you can dominate and win, but it's tough and it happens. It's part of racing.
"
Had Truex Jr. won, it would have made a better story but not a better race. Other than what has become the usual late-race tension—a huge crash on lap 241 and an abortive run on Busch by runner-up Kevin Harvick—the race was as predictable as it gets.
Truex Jr. led the first 25 laps and pulled away by more than four seconds in that relatively brief span. The race had only 16 lead changes—most involving pit sequences—and six caution flags. Five of the slowdowns were either for debris directly or debris tied to cars scraping walls.
A freak failure doomed Truex Jr. Harvick's Chevy hit some debris during the height of his pursuit of Busch, and that was enough, apparently, to allow Busch to check out and win by 1.112 seconds.
Drivers still speak glowingly of new rules that have made passing easier, but the racing seems to be getting worse instead of better.
"I thought the package was a little better," A.J. Allmendinger, who finished eighth, said. "It's still tough to pass. You kind of get stuck in those guys' wake at times, but if your car is good enough, you can maneuver around and still make passes."
"It's so hard to explain to our fans what's going on that you can't see, but the air is controlling the whole race," Brad Keselowski, who finished 10th, said to Fox Sports. "You can be three quarters of a second faster than someone, but you get stuck behind them in that air wake and you slow right down."
"At the end there, we spun out and some of us hit each other. All air spun all of our cars out, and that just shows how aero-sensitive the cars still are," Keselowksi continued. "It's better than we've been, but obviously, it could still be better."
Busch has finished first or second in five of the last six races, and Gibbs-owned Toyotas have won the same number.
"The hardest thing in pro sports is to stay up there every week," Gibbs said. "Right now, it's been a thrill."
Easy for him to say.
"The Gibbs cars are better than everybody pretty much everywhere," Keselowski said. "I think that's pretty obvious. I feel like we're kind of hovering in that fifth-to-10th range right now, which is respectable but not as good as we want to be, but in striking distance."
Even Busch said track position was key, noting that he had trouble while mired in traffic. He has won at every track on the current schedule except Charlotte and Pocono. Kansas was another notch on his belt.
"It's nice to be able to accomplish the things that you set out to accomplish," he said in a media conference. "Having some of those race tracks being ones that have been very difficult for me over the years, this one here, especially, makes it great to get a monkey off your back."
A year ago, the season began on an encouraging note. Gradually, at intermediate tracks in particular, the quality deteriorated, leading NASCAR first to experiment and then to adapt to yet another new rules package for the current season.
Perhaps the most instructive words were those spoken by Keselowski after he won at Las Vegas on March 6.
"The challenge for NASCAR is that we've got all these race teams spending millions of dollars to develop the aerodynamics on the cars because there's such a competitive advantage to finding more downforce, finding more side force, reducing the drag on the cars. It will only take us about half a year to a year's time to where we remove all the benefits that this package has given the racing to showcase a day like we saw (at Las Vegas) with a lot of passing for the lead.
I think the challenge for NASCAR is just to continue to stay ahead of that with segments and changes, knowing that the teams will continue to develop. There's a lot of different interests, of course, in this sport. The interest of the teams is to be the fastest. Quite frankly, when we have the fastest car, we just want to be fast, we don't care if it makes the racing great or bad.
"
The racer's edge clearly belongs to Kyle Busch and Joe Gibbs' team of Toyotas. Other teams are working double-time, but only NASCAR is in charge.
Follow @montedutton on Twitter.
All quotes are taken from NASCAR media, team and manufacturer sources, unless otherwise noted.
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