Martin Truex Jr. retired from professional full-time racing at the end of the 2024 season and is now spending most of his time in the wild outdoors. As much as he is lauded for his calm and collected demeanor, one of the bad judgments he made in his career was with a team he drove for.
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Truex was a driver for Michael Waltrip Racing from 2010 to 2013. In an interview after joining the team, he praised their work culture and said, “It is just so much fun to work there, and the guys are so proud of their work and what is going on. I think a lot of it has to do with how far they’ve come in such a short amount of time.”
“You think about it, they haven’t had the success that some of the other teams have had, so all of this success and stuff is new to them. They really take a lot of pride in what they’re doing.” His excitement was something that any driver who joins a new team would have. The eagerness to achieve success with a motivated group must have been running high in him.
But only a few years later, while he was still a driver for the team, the team was involved in a major scandal that led to its eventual shutdown. Famously known as “Spingate,” the 2013 incident involved race manipulation to help Truex make the Chase for the Sprint Cup Series championship. This cost the team major sponsors like NAPA.
The big scandal that came before Truex joined the team
The other major scandal that Michael Waltrip Racing was involved in was in 2007. In the team’s very first race, racing for Toyota, the 2007 Daytona 500, it was caught with illegal additives in its fuel. This additive was supposedly helping the team achieve a higher horsepower in its No. 55 car, which Waltrip himself drove.
It was discovered by NASCAR officials, who noticed a strange smell emanating from the car’s hood during pre-race inspection. While Waltrip and his team argued that oil had found its way into the fuel mixture, NASCAR refused to buy the story. The result of it all was the team being hit with the biggest penalty seen to date — a 100-point deduction and a $100,000 fine.
Truex’s association with Michael Waltrip Racing is banked by two of the biggest scams in the sport’s history. It is a pity that his joy of being a part of the group was short-lived.
