Martin Truex Jr put his early season bad luck well behind him with a dominant win in the NASCAR Sprint Cup’s 600-mile race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Possible victories slipped through his fingers at Daytona, Texas and Dover earlier in the year, but nothing and nobody could get close to Truex on Sunday night.
He began the race on pole in his Furniture Row Racing Toyota, and would have gone unchallenged for the majority of the evening if not for a late charge from Kevin Harvick.
Truex broke the Cup record for most laps led during a race at Charlotte, leading all but eight of the 400, during which Jimmie Johnson inherited the lead temporarily during pitstops.
Even more impressively, his 588 miles led is the most ever in one race in the history of NASCAR.
With his win, Truex joins Denny Hamlin, Jimmie Johnson, Brad Keselowski, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth in the provisional Chase field.
The fight for best of the rest was largely contested by Johnson, Harvick and Joey Logano. The latter narrowly got past Johnson during the pitstop window of lap 166-168, but at the next round of stops, Logano received a drive-through penalty for his pit crew coming over the wall too early, putting him a lap down and eliminating him from the hunt for the lead.
It made for a stark contrast to Logano’s race at Charlotte a week prior, where he scooped a $1million prize in the All-Star race, but his loss was Johnson’s gain, and the Hendrick Motorsports man seized second place.
Traffic towards the end of the race began to slow the leader slightly, and Johnson closed up to within half a second.
But Johnson too encountered the traffic, and a late turn of pace from Harvick got him past, and into second.
It was then Harvick’s turn to set about trying to catch Truex, but nothing could touch the Furniture Row Racing machine, and he finished around two and a half seconds ahead of his rival.
