Martin Truex Jr. reels in NASCAR stage wins, but fish get away
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The sun was pounding down on Daytona International Speedway Friday morning, and the fish in Lake Lloyd in the track infield were hiding, like every other intelligent creature.
The temperature was pushing toward 90, and the humidity was somewhere off any reasonable scale. But Martin Truex Jr. wasn’t relaxing in his air-conditioned motorhome. He was on the lake tossing a line into the water, in search of the elusive Lake Lloyd lunker.
Truex fished with professional bass fisherman Kevin VanDam and guest Air Force Master Sergeant Oscar Dominguez.
The morning wasn’t as productive as the season Truex has enjoyed on track. He caught one bass. Too hot, he explained. They weren’t biting.
In February, during Daytona 500 activities, Lake Lloyd fishing is better, Truex said. “A ton of fish; big ones, too,” he said. “Cooler then. Makes a big difference.”
The heat has been a topic of conversation at DIS this week as teams prepare for Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400.
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Truex has applied his own sort of heat to the competition during the runup to this part of the season, scoring 11 stage wins and amassing 21 playoff points to dominate those categories. No other driver has scored more than four stage wins (Kyle Busch), and seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson is second in playoff points with 16.
Truex has won at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Kansas Speedway and is the overall leader in laps led (963) across the season’s first 16 races. Truex has led in 12 of the 16 races and, according to Kurt Busch’s commentary this week on Truex’s playoff point total, can “lollygag” from here to the final weeks of the season and still be in good shape.
Friday’s update from Truex is that there will be no lollygagging.
“We’ve got a lot more races to win,” Truex said. “Obviously, stages have been good to us. We’ve got a lot of those. We’re going to try to keep racking them up. The last two weeks we’ve felt like we had the dominant car and didn’t win, so that’s disappointing and that’s fueling our fire for the next couple of weeks.”
Despite the bonus points he has accumulated, Truex said his team continues to focus on the race at hand, not preparing for events and a title challenge down the road.
“We go to the racetrack every weekend to win, not to learn for next week or the next time around,” he said. “We go to win. If you’re not taking your best stuff to the track every weekend, you’re going to get your butt beat.”
Truex said Furniture Row Racing didn’t begin the season with “a secret plan” to score stage wins but rather has succeeded in that category because the team’s Toyotas have been reliably fast.
“When you put yourself at the front of the pack every week, you’re going to get stage wins,” he said. “It’s worked in our favor. The longer runs have been our strong suit, and that has played well into the stage thing. But it really hasn’t been a master plan.”
PHOTOS: MARTIN TRUEX JR. THROUGH THE YEARS
