A closer examination of how Martin Truex Jr. entered the Cup playoffs as the regular-season winner suggests we shouldn’t be surprised by his playoff struggles.
Truex won the regular-season championship by 48 points over Denny Hamlin and 64 points over William Byron. Given that the maximum number of points a driver can earn in a single race is 60 points, that seems like a pretty dominant run for Truex.
But don’t forget that Hamlin was penalized 25 points for wrecking Ross Chastain at the first Phoenix race. Without that penalty, Truex would have won the regular season championship by 23 points instead of 48.
Byron suffered an even larger penalty: 60 points and five playoff points due to a greenhouse violation discovered after the first Richmond race. Without that points penalty, Byron finishes the regular season in second place, just four points behind Truex. One could argue that the greenhouse violation might have given Byron an advantage — but he finished 24th at that Richmond race.
I’m not suggesting Truex didn’t deserve to win the regular-season championship. The competition, though, was a little closer than the numbers suggest. I thus thought it useful to go back and review Truex’s season.
Rank and finishes
The two graphs on the diagram below show Truex’s rank (top) and finishing position (bottom) for each race this season. In this graph:
- Clear bars denote races Truex did not finish.
- Red ‘P’s show races in which his team incurred penalties. I did not include purposeful penalties (e.g., entering pit road when it was closed) that were associated with incidents.
- The boxed notations indicate caution-causing incidents due to accidents (A), spins (SP) and tire issues (TI).
The graph highlights some positive features of Truex’s 2023 season.
- Truex has only two DNFs this year, the second-best record among playoff contenders. Chris Buescher has only one DNF to date. Kyle Larson, who clinched his spot in the Championship 4 last week by winning at Las Vegas, leads playoff contenders with seven DNFs.
- The No. 19 team incurred seven penalties during the regular season, but none during the playoffs.
- Truex’s poorest finishes — 25th and worse — all resulted from involvement in accidents, spins or tire issues.
- Although the team has had some bad luck (like the tire puncture at Kansas) they’ve also had their share of good luck. For example, Truex pulled off a ninth-place finish after the tactical mistake of staying out for track position at Las Vegas.
The negative of the last point is that the Vegas P9 is Truex’s best playoff finish so far.
A deeper dive into playoff tracks
My earlier examination of track types in the playoffs suggested that Byron and Truex should have an advantage because the playoffs include the types of tracks where they run well. A closer look at the track-by-track data shows that track types might be too broad a lens for predicting playoff performance.
In the earlier analysis, I classified track types into road courses, superspeedways and ovals by length. But some tracks within those subdivisions are rather dissimilar.
Darlington, for example, falls in the 1- to 1.49-mile oval track category. That category also includes Dover and Phoenix. Flat, doglegged Phoenix has little in common with Darlington’s high-banked egg-shaped oval or Dover’s concrete classic oval track.
With those types of differences in mind, let’s review where Truex has run well this season. He’s won three races:
- Dover
- Sonoma
- New Hampshire
Winning Sonoma might suggest Truex should benefit from having a road course in the playoffs. But Sonoma is a classic skill road course while the Roval is mostly Charlotte’s oval with a twisty detour. Success at one doesn’t necessarily mean success at the other. Truex has four wins at Sonoma and hasn’t earned even a top-five finish at the Roval.
Truex has posted a total of nine top-five finishes this season. That includes the wins noted above plus:
- Martinsville
- Charlotte (oval)
- Gateway
- Nashville
- Pocono
- Michigan
Michigan and Pocono are large non-superspeedway ovals that aren’t represented at all in the playoffs. Gateway and Nashville also have few good comparison tracks in the last 10 races. The bright spot for Truex is that Martinsville is the final elimination race.
A side note about top-five finishes: Larson leads the field with 14. Byron and Hamlin each have 13. Among the rest of the playoff field, no one has more than nine.
Top-10 finishes
As Las Vegas showed, top-10 finishes aren’t enough to survive the Round of 8. Continuing to these tracks, however, supports my point. Truex has earned 16 top-10 finishes, which ties with Larson, but is below Byron, Hamlin and Christopher Bell. Here are the tracks at which Truex finished between sixth and 10th:
- Las Vegas (spring and fall)
- Bristol Dirt Race
- Kansas
- Richmond
- Indy Road Course
- Watkins Glen
Neither Richmond nor Watkins Glen are great comparisons to any of the playoff tracks. Truex did well at both Las Vegas races. He should have done well at Kansas but punctured a tire on Lap 3.
A top-10 at the Indy Road Course should have suggested a decent finish at the Roval. Truex showed he could work his way to the front of the field in the first half of the race. But after pitting following Stage 2, he never got any higher than 17th. He finished 20th.
Much of Truex’s regular-season points come from tracks without good counterparts in the playoffs. In addition, his bad luck has come mostly at tracks where he should have performed best. Those two features have combined to produce a disappointing playoff run for the No. 19.
But 2023 is still a significant improvement for Truex relative to a 2022 season that had him questioning whether to continue racing. One can only expect 2024 to be even better as his team gains additional experience with the Next Gen car at a diverse group of tracks.