Martin Truex Jr. reveals how close NASCAR Cup Series career came to ending after NAPA deal fell through

Martin Truex Jr. can look back on his NASCAR Cup Series tenure and be proud with his accomplishments, but his journey to becoming a champion, and a future Hall of Fame inductee, was far from a straight path.

During an appearance on The Dale Jr. Download this week, Truex Jr. joined Dale Earnhardt Jr. to detail all the twists and turns in his career, and how he ended up one of the greatest drivers in his generation.

“You’ve talked about your career, I wanted to discuss that a little bit,” Earnhardt Jr. prefaced. “I can’t think of another situation that’s kind of like yours, where it’s almost two halves. I don’t know how you feel about it, but basically, when the public looks at your career, there’s this Martin Truex Jr. that we all thought we knew, and then there’s this second half of your career, where you were the best — one of the best, if not the best, driver in the series, in terms of Championship 4 appearances, championships, wins and all of the success that you had.

“It’s a hell of a story, because it almost wasn’t to be, right? How close, I guess, how close was it? There was a moment where you lost the deal with — the Napa thing fell apart. You’ve talked about Barney almost pulling the plug at one point. Take us back to those moments, when you weren’t really sure where your career was going to go.”

Speaking with the man who helped him get his start in NASCAR, Truex Jr. highlighted some of the major moments in his career, including his time at DEI, his success at Michael Waltrip Racing under the Napa banner before losing that sponsorship, and his move to Furniture Row Racing, which changed everything.

“Well yeah, there was actually more than that. Even going back to you know, DEI, and when you left, and when things started to kind of unravel. You know, we joined with Ganassi, and it was the No. 1 car and the No. 42 car. That was kind of ugly too, you know, that wasn’t much fun, and things were going really bad. But you know, the Napa deal there, it was so late in the year, that was probably the scariest point in time,” Truex Jr. explained. “You know, I remember just thinking like, ‘There’s a chance that I don’t have a job next year,’ you know, and we had won a race that year, and made the playoffs for a couple of hours, at least. But yeah, that was probably the toughest moment, I guess, was just not knowing.

“Things kind of came together pretty quickly, but still at that point I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to a team that doesn’t really have a good track-record.’ You know, they’ve won a race, and they were running — 2013, they ran pretty good with Kurt. They were starting to kind of show up at the front occasionally. But yeah, I didn’t see the future going the way it was going to go. Went from not sure I’d have a job, to two years later, you know, winning our first race together, and the next couple of years were just ridiculous, you know? Storybook.”

In the end, Martin Truex Jr. had the kind of career you can make a movie out of in the NASCAR Cup Series. We’ll see if he can end his chapter with the perfect conclusion, a championship in Phoenix come November 2024.