FORT WORTH, Texas – Easily considered one of the favorites for Sunday’s O’Reilly Auto Parts 500 at Texas Motor Speedway, reigning Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion Martin Truex Jr. saw a strong day end prematurely with a Lap 80 crash.
Exiting Turn 4, running second to leader Kevin Harvick, Truex’s tire gave way on his No. 78 5-hour Energy Toyota Camry sending Truex slamming into the frontstretch wall and abruptly ending a dominant stretch of consistency on mile-and-a-half tracks.
Truex’s 37th place finish was his first DNF (did not finish) of the year and first since Talladega Superspeedway last October (12 races).
“Just blew a right-front tire out of nowhere,” Truex said. “Not sure what happened there – if we run something over or what. I think the first set of tires that came off the car looked great. We were just making our way towards the front.
“Would’ve been nice to have at least finished that first stage before it happened, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes.”
The Mayetta, N.J. native said he had little warning that his tire was going down and didn’t exactly know how it happened.
“I couldn’t tell you,” said Truex. “I mean obviously it’s – I don’t know if I run something over. Speeds are really fast here today with the cool temperatures and I don’t know if that had something to do with it or not. We’ll just have to go back and evaluate that, but all in all, we were going to be in for a good day.
“We were making the car better and still had room to go. We were as fast as anybody. At least that’s a positive and we’ll go on to next week and see what we can do.”
Truex, who won a Cup Series record seven races on 1.5-mile tracks in 2017 had 13 consecutive top-10s and 10 straight top-five efforts on 1.5-mile tracks dating back to his championship season last year.
Texas will bring his worst result of 2018 on the strength of five back-to-back top-five results from Atlanta to Martinsville Speedway on March 25.
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
