Texas could be a great place for those looking for their first win this season
Hendrick Motorsports driver William Byron arrives in Fort Worth this weekend both the most recent NASCAR Cup Series winner – at Martinsville, Va. last week – and also the defending winner of Sunday’s AutoTrader EchoPark Automotive 400 at Texas Motor Speedway (3 p.m. ET on FS1, PRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
It’s been that kind of season for the 26-year old Charlotte native. But winning back-to-back races at the 1.5-mile Texas high banks has proven to be quite the task in recent years. The last driver to do so was another Hendrick star, seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion and NASCAR Hall of Famer Jimmie Johnson who actually won three straight in the 2014-15 seasons. Johnson, owner-driver of Legacy Motor Club, will be making his second start of the season this week at Texas, where he is the all-time winningest driver (seven victories).
Texas has certainly proven to be its own unique challenge and that may open the door for a handful of drivers high in the rankings still racing for their first victories of the year.
Hendrick’s Kyle Larson leads Joe Gibbs Racing’s Martin Truex Jr. by 14 points in the standings. Larson, last year’s Texas runner-up and the 2021 race winner, spent part of this week participating in the Indianapolis 500 open test in preparation to run racing’s great “Double” the Indy 500 and NASCAR’s esteemed Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, N.C. in the same day.
Truex, the 2017 series champion has never won at Texas but has three runner-up finishes. His No. 19 JGR Toyota has led laps in four of the last five races. And 12 of 34 career wins have come on 1.5-mile tracks.
“It’s been one of those places where we have been snakebit a lot,” Truex said. “We’ve had some good runs, we’ve had some struggles at times since they repaved it. Just one of those things, but I feel confident going there with what we have that we’ll run well, especially how we ran there the last couple of years.
“It’s been tough, we’ve gotten a lot of poles there and led a lot of laps, but we just haven’t been able to win there.”
Truex is one of three drivers ranked among the top-6 still looking for that first win of this season. Reigning series champion Ryan Blaney and 2020 series champion Chase Elliott are the other two.
Blaney, driver of the No. 12 Team Penske Ford, has top-10 finishes in eight of the last 10 Texas races winning the pole position and finishing runner-up in 2018. He has top-five finishes in four of the eight races this season, including both 1.5-mile tracks with a season-best runner-up at Atlanta in February. He’s coming off a fifth-place finish at Martinsville last week.
Elliott scored his first NASCAR Xfinity Series victory at Texas in 2014. The driver of the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet finished top-10 in half of his 13 NASCAR Cup Series starts at the track, with a career best showing of fourth-place in 2016. He’s had only a single top-10 in the last seven races, however.
This season marks a huge turnaround for the former champ, who missed seven races last year recovering from a skiing injury and a suffering a one-race suspension. He’s ranked sixth in points, only 51 points off the pace of his Hendrick teammate Larson and is coming off back-to-back top five efforts at Richmond, Va. and Martinsville.
Where a driver starts on the Texas high banks has proven to be especially key to where a driver finishes. More than 76 percent of the races have been won from a top-10 starting position. So far this season, Elliott and Team Penske’s Joey Logano lead the series with six top-10 starts, however, neither driver has won a race.
A 45-minute practice session is set for 10:35 a.m. ET on Saturday followed by Busch Light Pole Qualifying at 11:20 p.m. ET., both will be televised live on FS1.
Source: Holly Cain | NASCAR Wire Service
