But Truex, a 26-year-old native of Mayetta, N.J., is getting tired of taking notes. More than half of the Nextel Cup season has been completed, and Truex wants better results. His Dale Earnhardt Inc. teammate is Dale Earnhardt Jr. Success is expected from this team.
“This deal’s a lot tougher than everybody thinks it is,” Truex said over the weekend at New Hampshire International Speedway.
What happened to him in New Hampshire underscored that. Truex’s car handled poorly in practice Friday morning. He rebounded to post the eighth-best qualifying time Friday afternoon, matching a season best.
But he fell to 19th by the 60th of 308 laps Sunday, and he was in the mid-20’s for most of the last 100 laps. He avoided the kind of trouble that befell top drivers like Tony Stewart, who crashed into the wall, but Truex finished 18th. He has only one top-10 finish this season.
“It seems like every time things are going good, it falls out of our hands,” Truex said. “By Sunday, our setup just doesn’t want to work the way it does in practice.”
Six drivers are serious contenders for rookie-of-the-year honors, and Truex is fourth among them in points. He was picked in a preseason news media poll to win the award. Now that award will most likely go to Denny Hamlin.
Hamlin, a 25-year-old Virginian, has a chance to make the 10-race Chase for the Nextel Cup, which begins Sept. 17 at New Hampshire International Speedway. Hamlin is 12th in the drivers’ standings, and the top 10 drivers and those within 400 points of the leader will make the cut. Truex is 23rd.
Hamlin would be in the top 10 had he not run out of gas on the final lap of Sunday’s race. Hamlin was attempting to catch Kyle Busch, who won the race, when he suddenly slowed. He coasted to a sixth-place finish.
Hamlin drives a car owned by Joe Gibbs Racing, which also owns cars driven by Stewart and another rookie, J. J. Yeley. Hamlin was the top rookie in the midseason news media poll.
Although Truex has a choice job driving for Dale Earnhardt Inc., Gibbs owns the defending series champion’s car, Stewart’s.
Referring to Hamlin, Truex said: “He’s got a team that’s been there. He’s on a team that won a championship. They’ve got a lot of notes to look back on. The second time around is going to be a big change for us. We’re getting stuff out of the way that isn’t going to work.”
The Nextel Cup series returns this week to Pocono Raceway, the unusual, coat-hanger-shaped track in Long Pond, Pa., where 500-mile races seem to last an eternity. Truex finished 24th in a race there June 11. Hamlin won that race.
Truex had to outrace Hamlin, among others, to win his second consecutive Busch Series championship last year. So he knows Hamlin is beatable. Truex’s team includes essentially the same people it had last year in the Busch Series, so they are cohesive.
“I have fun all the time,” Truex said. “This group of guys has a lot of fun. They’re fun to be around, whether we’re doing good or bad.”
Earnhardt is not guaranteed to have success every week, either. The engine in his car failed during Sunday’s race, and he finished last. The underside of his hood was splotched with chunks of tires, and the floorboard was so hot he walked with a limp.
“It was some kind of a freak deal, man,” Earnhardt, who fell four spots in the standings to seventh, said Sunday.
The race was only the second that Earnhardt failed to finish this season. Truex has failed to finish three races — two the result of accidents. He has finished his last nine races and says he hopes to begin piling up more impressive results.
“In the big picture, we’re doing a good job,” Truex said. “I think it’s just a matter of time before we turn that corner and get over that hump.”
Truex, the driver of the No. 1 car, is somewhere in the middle of the pack. He said he thought he would get better, because he cannot think about his season going any other way. The hump he needs to scale, he said, is more like a hill. He keeps bumping into it.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed,” he said.
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