Martin Truex Jr. has the 'same mindset' he had in 2017 championship season

A season ago, Martin Truex Jr. came up three points short of the postseason. This year, he enters the odds-on favorite to win the championship. Truex and his team are going to try and put together a NASCAR Playoffs run like they did in 2017. They’re off to a good start.

Winning the second regular season championship of his career, Martin Truex Jr. feels good. He’s coming into the postseason tied with William Byron for most points. He’s won three races and the Busch Light Clash. In the last 12 weeks, he’s arguably been the best driver in the Cup Series.

At NASCAR Playoffs Media Days, Truex talked to the media about his team. It is more or less the same one he’s had, dating back to that 2017 championship. So, they’ve been there. And everyone is hungry to avenge their poor season a year ago.

“Yeah, I mean I feel like our team’s very experienced playoff-wise, and the core group of us have been together,” Truex Jr. said about the upcoming postseason. “We just have the same mindset we had in 2017, it feels like the same thing. So, that’s always good and gives me a lot of confidence. They’re doing a great job and pushing all the right buttons. So, we just gotta keep doing that.”

They say that Martin Truex Jr. is a boring loser. When he wins, he dominates and uglies up the race. He’s been able to do that four times this year all thanks to a big change.

Martin Truex Jr. and his team ‘understand’ the Next Gen car more

So, how did the veteran NASCAR driver and his No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team make such a big leap from one season to the next? How did he go from zero wins and looking at retirement to a season like this and being the championship favorite?

With a year under their belt, the team in the 19 garage got to work on figuring out what went wrong. With the new car, they had to test things out. Experiment here and there. Unfortunately, there were many times when it looked like those experiments were just flat-out wrong.

Martin Truex Jr. was asked if understanding the car more this season made a difference. For him, it made all the difference.

“That’s certainly a big part of it,” Truex responded. “If you look across JGR, Toyota as a whole I feel like we’re stronger this year. Everybody did a really good job during the offseason of making the right changes and working on the right things. And I think for us, for me, James, Jazzy, our team, understanding the car, yeah. We took a lot of gambles last year, we tested a lot of things and we found out a lot of things that didn’t work, and that’s part of the process of figuring these things out.

“So, think we were really aggressive last year and that was maybe not great at times, but for this year it just helped speed up that learning process. Better cars, better understanding of those cars, and then being able to put it all together has been the difference.”

Heading into Darlington, Martin Truex Jr. is a 5-1 favorite to win his fourth race of the season. If he does, he will get a very strong start in the playoffs. He’ll have to hold off the Darlington winner from earlier this year and his co-leader at the moment, William Byron.