(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)
By Aaron Bearden
Main Takeaway
What should we make of Martin Truex Jr. and the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team right now?
On paper the team is a championship favorite. Truex looks as good as ever in his 18th full-time Cup season. After a much-desired win at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the 2017 champ has the points lead, three points-paying wins and seven top-fives. Truex and crew chief James Small have shaken off a disappointing 2022 and reasserted themselves as title contenders on-track.
The issues for Truex come off-track. There’s great uncertainty among Truex and his urge to return to the No. 19 team in 2024. Last year Truex decided to return in June. This time around July is rolling along without a decision.
“Will you please talk to him for me?” team owner Joe Gibbs said after Truex’s Monday win. “He tells me the same thing every year, that ‘I’m right in the middle of trying to make this decision.'”
Gibbs would like to have Truex back. Who can blame him? Truex is an unproblematic Cup star that’s typically good for multiple races wins and a deep playoff run.
But Truex is less certain. The veteran, self-admitted as “bad at making big decisions,” is struggling to decide if we wants to commit to another year in the Cup Series.
“My team is amazing,” Truex said. “They deserve the very best driver, the guy that wants it more than anyone else, and I’ve been that guy. I want to make sure that if I come back, I’m willing to do that. … It takes a lot of commitment. It’s a lot of travel, a lot of time missing things with family and friends and all those things that I’ve done for 25 years. Do I want to keep doing it and am I willing to sacrifice all those things again for my team?”
That’s up to Truex to decide. But the decision is slowly becoming the focal point of the No. 19 team’s summer.
There’s a lot riding on it. Can the squad stay focused and avoid getting lackadaisical if Truex does decide to retire? Will Truex’s focus remain as intense if he knows he’s coming back next year? Can the group stay focused as the uncertainty lingers on?
Crew chief James Small says the team isn’t worried about Truex’s decision. “We’re just here to win every week and win the championship,” he said Monday. “What will be is what will be. We don’t even talk about it with him — none of us on the team (do).”
The future’s impossible to predict. But for right now, Truex and the No. 19 team remain one of the top teams in the garage.
Good, Bad and Ugly
Ugly: Caution Lineup Confusion
What’s going on with the lineups under yellow this year?
Alex Bowman was caught up in a late crash that set off a caution flag Monday. So it came as a surprise when Bowman restarted inside of the top-five on the ensuing restart – ahead of drivers that appeared to pass him when the caution flag flew.
It was the second time in recent weeks that the lineup has seemed off compared to reality after a crash. The first came in Chicago, when a track-clogging pileup shuffled the order and left NASCAR with a difficult officiating decision as it re-stacked the field.
The end result of Monday’s decision wasn’t significant to the race itself. Bowman finished 14th, roughly the area he was running in beforehand. But small shuffles in position could prove significant this year – particularly when drivers like Bowman and Chase Elliott are working to make up points gaps in the playoff standings.
Racing is a sport of margins. Little shifts can make a big difference in the end. Hopefully this is a nothing story, but it’ll be interesting to see if similar track position confusion arrives in the playoffs when the intensity ramps up.
Bad: Aric Almirola’s tough break
He nearly did it again.
Two years after a shock New Hampshire win elevated him into the playoff field, Almirola again positioned himself with a chance to strike big in the northeast and salvage a brutal regular season. The Floridian qualified third, ran inside of the top-five and even emerged with the lead after a two-tire stop in the race’s middle stages.
But that same stop was where things went wrong. Almirola’s right-rear lug nut wasn’t tight. So when he sailed off into Turn 1 on the Lap 169 restart, the wheel tried to slide off the car. It made the No. 10 Ford impossible to control, sending Almirola into a race-ending crash.
The crash was a heartbreaker. It took the best run of the No. 10 team’s year and left it with a 34th-place result.
Was Almirola actually going to win? Probably not – Truex’s dominant performance made it clear that he was the class of the field. But there were numerous late restarts where a desperate Almirola could have made something happen.
He just had to be there to do it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. It’s difficult to imagine the No. 10 team having another opportunity as strong as this to make the playoffs with just six races left in the regular season.
Good: We’re Points Racing, Y’all
With just six races remaining before the 2023 Cup Series playoffs, the battle for the final spots is as tight as ever.
There are 11 drivers effectively locked into the playoffs with a win: William Byron (4), Truex (3), Kyle Busch (3), Kyle Larson (2), Christopher Bell, Denny Hamlin, Ross Chastain, Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano, Tyler Reddick and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Three others – Kevin Harvick (+137), Brad Keselowski (+108) and Chris Buescher (+97) – are sitting pretty on points unless a swarm of new winners shake things up.
That leaves two spots up for grabs in the back of the playoff field. Right now Bubba Wallace and Michael McDowell hold them, but Daniel Suarez is only one point behind McDowell and two back from Wallace. AJ Allmendinger (-20) is also well within range.
With tracks like Daytona International Speedway and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course laying ahead in the regular season, there’s a real chance that a couple surprise winners cut the points battle out of the equation. But for now it truly feels like every point counts for the drivers on the cut line. It’s going to be fun to watch them battle it out down the stretch.
Bad: Hendrick’s playoff odds get worse
If you’re a fan of Bowman or Chase Elliott, your sense of playoff desperation is probably on the rise.
At a time when the pair each need big point days to improve their playoff odds, neither made much progress in New Hampshire. Elliott finished 12 but failed to score stage points. Bowman earned four stage points but came home a quiet 14th.
That leaves Bowman 42 points below the cutoff in 20th, with Elliott 60 points below the line in 23rd. The duo are each in a bad spot after missing races with injury (and a one-race suspension for Elliott) earlier in the year.
With consistent top-fives, a playoff spot could still be within reach on points. But at this stage it’s likely that either driver will need a win if they hope to give Hendrick Motorsports more than two cars in playoff contention this fall.
Notes
- Ryan Preece was upset with Michael McDowell after late contact between the pair dropped Preece to 28th in Monday’s race. He approached the 2021 Daytona 500 winner on pit road to discuss it. McDowell followed Preece to the garage area to continue the conversation. In the end McDowell took the blame for impacting Preece’s day while he finished 13th.
- With his brother Brian spotting, Brad Keselowski notched his fourth top-five of the season in New Hampshire. That’s three more than he managed in the entirety of 2022, a good example of the improvement at RFK Racing the looks poised to send both cars to the playoffs.
- Daniel Suarez left New Hampshire below the playoff cutline, but things could have been much worse. The Mexican star ran long during the last green-flag pit sequence and was about to have to stop and fall laps down when a caution flew for Noah Gragson. Suarez fell to 21st after taking four tires under caution, but rallied to 16th.
- What seemed like a guaranteed top-five and potential win for Ryan Blaney was lost to a penalty for running over equipment during the final round of pit stops. The end result? Blaney ended up back in 22nd after contact with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Ty Gibbs.
- Gibbs got the worst of that contact, getting sent into the outside wall and fading back to 27th. It was a tough break that may have pushed Gibbs too far back to rally his way into the playoffs on points.
- Stenhouse was lucky to salvage 18th from a day that went wrong in the opening stage. His No. 47 team elected to stay out as everyone else pitted under the Lap 30 competition yellow. The Daytona 500 winner inherited the lead, but dropped behind all lead lap cars before falling a lap down on the ensuing run. He spent nearly the whole race fighting to recover from the call.
- It’s not often that a prior year’s Round of 8 contender has reason to be happy with a 10th-place finish. But the past three months have been brutal to Chase Briscoe, so his contentment was understandable. After rattling off three-straight top-fives at Bristol, Martinsville and Talladega in April, Briscoe had finished no better than 17th and cracked the top-20 just three times in the past nine races. So 10th isn’t great – but at least it’s a sign of improvement.
Race Results
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Joey Logano
- Kyle Larson
- Kevin Harvick
- Brad Keselowski
- Tyler Reddick
- Denny Hamlin
- Bubba Wallace
- Austin Dillon
- Chase Briscoe
- Erik Jones
- Chase Elliott
- Michael McDowell
- Alex Bowman
- Chris Buescher
- Daniel Suarez
- Justin Haley
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
- AJ Allmendinger
- Harrison Burton
- Todd Gilliland
- Ryan Blaney
- Ross Chastain
- William Byron
- Austin Cindric
- Ty Dillon
- Ty Gibbs
- Ryan Preece
- Christopher Bell
- Ryan Newman
- BJ McLeod
- Noah Gragson
- Corey LaJoie
- Aric Almirola
- Cole Custer
- Kyle Busch
Stage 1
- Martin Truex Jr.
- William Byron
- Tyler Reddick
- Aric Almirola
- Ryan Blaney
- Christopher Bell
- Denny Hamlin
- Daniel Suarez
- Joey Logano
- Michael McDowell
Stage 2
- Martin Truex Jr.
- Kyle Larson
- Joey Logano
- Ryan Blaney
- Denny Hamlin
- Kevin Harvick
- Alex Bowman
- Brad Keselowski
- Tyler Reddick
- Christopher Bell
Playoff Picture
In With A Win
- William Byron (4)
- Martin Truex Jr. (3)
- Kyle Busch (3)
- Kyle Larson (2)
- Christopher Bell
- Denny Hamlin
- Ross Chastain
- Ryan Blaney
- Joey Logano
- Tyler Reddick
- Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
Above the Cut
- Kevin Harvick (+137)
- Brad Keselowski (+108)
- Chris Buescher (+97)
- Bubba Wallace (+2)
- Michael McDowell (+1)
Within Reach
- Daniel Suarez (-1)
- AJ Allmendinger (-20)
- Ty Gibbs (-41)
- Alex Bowman (-42)
- Justin Haley (-46)
- Austin Cindric (-51)
- Chase Elliott (-60)
Need to Win
- Corey LaJoie
- Todd Gilliland
- Ryan Preece
- Aric Almirola
- Erik Jones
- Austin Dillon
- Harrison Burton
- Chase Briscoe
- Ty Dillon
- Noah Gragson
Next up: Pocono 400 at Pocono Raceway (July 23)
