Heading into the race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Martin Truex Jr. had to run his best to gain atleast some momentum to get into the championship four. Sure he has two more chances to make it happen, but winning the opening round of the round of eight does have its benefits.
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However, in an attempt to stay at the front of the pack and gain some advantage, the JGR driver’s pit wall seemed to make a poor call. During the end of Stage 1 when all of the cars came in to pit for a new set of tires, Truex’s crew chief James Small advised him to stay out instead.
This ultimately backfired on him after he had to pit sometime later for new tires, relegating him to the middle of the pack and unable to move up the order due to traffic. Recently, while speaking about the Vegas strategy nightmare for Truex Jr., teammate Denny Hamlin discussed the topic on his podcast, Actions Detrimental.
Denny Hamlin speaks about Martin Truex Jr.’s strategy call at Vegas
During the conversation, Hamlin mentioned, “I just think the #19 team is gonna flip the switch and they’re gonna be there and you just might as well count on it. I still believe it. I do, until they don’t make the next round. I still believe it.”
He added, “I think they were stronger than their finish yesterday. I will say that. I think that they did get behind on that call. I don’t I don’t think it was a bad call, though. I mean, I guess the result showed that it didn’t work out. But I mean, there was others on two tires calls and it worked. Well. I guess he was the only one who actually stayed out.”
After he remembered that Truex Jr. was the only one that stayed out he recalled seeing him on the race track and how he was very “wishy-washy.” Hamlin then mentioned that one can understand who would be heading into the pits based on their car’s body language.
Hamlin explains what Truex Jr. had been doing before the pit stops
Unlike the others who were down at the apron and cleaning their tires, Truex Jr. was seen “half a car wide to the right” of the track, basically giving himself the option to carry on instead of heading into the pits.
He added, “The problem was staying out is that you need to stay up front. Like you’ve got you really got to stay up front. Because you get swallowed up pretty early on restarts it just keeps getting worse four tires are passing you every lap. You can’t run the line you want to run because he got cars splitting the three wide and so he needed it to he probably needed to go ahead and have a quick caution so he could recover from that.”
He then explained that while the call to stay out seemed like a “genius call” it did not work out well for them since he was the only car out there. Had a few others also stayed out things would have worked out much better. Lastly, he concluded that strategies like this are often highly reliant on others and how they plan to play it out. So there is always a degree of uncertainty in these circumstances.
