LONG POND, Pa. – Same car. Vastly different result.
For the first 15 laps, pole winner Martin Truex Jr. looked every bit as if the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing chassis he drove to a dominating victory at Charlotte in May might pull off a duplicate performance in Monday’s Pennsylvania 400 at Pocono Raceway.
Truex was the class of the field for the first 15 laps, pulling out to a lead of almost three seconds before NASCAR called a planned competition caution on Lap 16. Almost immediately, the day went sour for the No. 78 team.
After a restart on Lap 20, the right front tire on Truex’s Toyota deflated, sending the car hard into the outside wall in Turn 2.
The culprit was a broken valve stem on the inner liner of the tire.
“A lug nut bounced off the ground, fell in behind the wheel on (the first) pit stop,” Truex said. “It’s just bad luck, honestly. I knew something wasn’t right in (Turn) 1, and I got real tight on that restart and went down the back and was like, ‘Ah, it feels okay.’
“And as I got closer to the Tunnel Turn, I felt it start to go down and by the time I let off and tried to slow down it was just going straight for the fence.”
Truex got back on the track and hit the wall twice more before retiring the car in 38th-place after completing 82 laps. It was a far cry from the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte, where Truex led 588 of 600 miles, a NASCAR record for a single race.
Source: Reid Spencer / NASCAR Wire Service
