Martin Truex Jr. ready for defense of Southern 500 title

Martin Truex Jr. knows it’s not easy to get on a roll like he has been on the past two seasons with Furniture Row Racing.

Truex Jr. is enjoying the most successful stretch of his career with the two-car team based out of Denver. The union has been one of the most dominant in NASCAR’s top series.

In the past two years, Truex Jr. has seven wins, second only to Jimmie Johnson. Prior to that, Truex Jr. won three times in 10 years in the Cup series.

“Great team, great situation. We are like a family and we continue to get better,” Truex Jr. said Tuesday at media day for September’s Bojangles Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway. “It has been a blessing to be part of this. … This sport changes so fast, so we are enjoying it while we are having success, but we are working hard to stay where we are at.

“We haven’t got a championship yet so we have some work to do. We feel good about this year, so we will see where it ends up.”

This season, Truex Jr. leads Kyle Larson by 85 points and has a series-best 29 playoff bonus points in the revamped postseason format. Those points will last through all 10 races in the NASCAR playoffs and will come in handy if Truex should stumble in the postseason, which will begin on Sept. 17 at Chicagoland Speewdway.

Truex Jr. could have used the padding last season. He won two of the first three races in the postseason, but was derailed with pair of 40^th-place finishes at Talladega and Texas.

“Leading the points and playoff points is a huge deal,” Truex Jr. said. “I don’t think anyone knows how critical those bonus points are going to be. But I feel really good where we are at.”

On Tuesday, Truex Jr. took part of one of his other passions – fishing. He spent about an hour fishing on Ramsey Pond, located outside of Turn 1 with Bassmaster fisherman Guy Eaker, among others.

Truex Jr. said events like that are perks of being a NASCAR driver.

Next month, Truex Jr. returns to Darlington as the defending champion of the Bojangles’ Southern 500, which he called one of the biggest wins of his career. He didn’t think he had much of a shot to win last year’s race but got a couple of big pit stops late and led the final 28 laps of the race.

“There were parts of that race, especially the middle, where I didn’t think we could win. We kept grinding it out, Darlington style and raced the race track,” Truex Jr. said. “If you want to be known as a driver who is really good, you want to win at Darlington. So winning here was an incredible experience.”

This story was originally published August 1, 2017 at 4:50 PM.