● 75 Greatest: On the heels of winning Monday’s rain-delayed race at Dover (Del.) Motor Speedway, Truex got a surprise phone call Tuesday from NASCAR CEO Jim France to let him know that he was chosen by NASCAR as one of the 75 Greatest Drivers in NASCAR history. NASCAR will be honoring the 75 greatest drivers later this month at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway during the annual throwback weekend at the track.
● 32 and Counting: With the win at Dover, Truex notched his 32nd career Cup Series victory, putting him 29th on the all-time Cup Series win list.
● Truex and the No. 19 team for Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) set the tone for the season right out of the gate by winning the 150-lap feature in the non-points Clash at the Coliseum on Feb. 5 in Los Angeles. Truex won his heat race, then went on to lead the final 25 laps of the feature en route to a victory that gave him and the team much-needed momentum heading into the 2023 season. While the team had been knocking on the door of its first points-paying win of the season, the breakthrough finally came at Dover. The Reser’s Fine Foods team is hoping to keep the momentum going at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City this weekend.
● Truex has two wins, 10 top-five finishes and 16 top-10s and has led a total of 827 laps in 29 career Cup Series starts at Kansas. Truex’s average Kansas finish is 12.2.
● Strong in the Heartland: Truex’s two Kansas wins came by way of a season sweep of the spring and fall races there in 2017. The feat kicked off a 12-race stretch on the 1.5-mile oval during which he earned six top-fives and finished inside the top-10 all but once.
● Reser’s Fine Foods is the primary sponsor on the No. 19 Toyota this weekend at Kansas, and the 1.5-mile oval also happens to be just down the road from Reser’s largest manufacturing facility in Topeka, Kansas. Truex will be visiting the Topeka manufacturing facility to greet hardworking employees and learn more about how Reser’s makes its fresh refrigerated deli salads and hot side dishes. The visit will help celebrate the importance of manufacturing and the people who make it all possible.
● Family owned and operated, Reser’s has been a proud sponsor of good times at racetracks, picnics, and barbecues since 1950 with a family of brands that includes Reser’s American Classics, Main St. Bistro, and more. Reser’s operates 14 facilities in the U.S., Mexico and Canada and actively supports the communities it serves. Visit resers.com to learn more.
● While he doesn’t like to play favorites, Truex certainly excels at tracks with worn-out surfaces, where driver skill is key to managing the tires and the racecar over the course of a long race. At four such tracks, Kansas, Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, and Homestead-Miami Speedway, Truex has notched six wins, 23 top-five finishes and 45 top-10s, and has led 2,209 laps. After Kansas this weekend, the Cup Series will race at Darlington next week.
● With his victory at Dover on Monday afternoon, Truex heads to Kansas having moved up to fourth in the driver standings, 40 points behind leader Ross Chastain.
You got the call this week that you are on the list of NASCAR’s 75 Greatest Drivers. What does that mean to you?
“It’s amazing. I’ve said it before, but when I got the opportunity to race cars for a living, I never thought I would get to where I’m at. I’ve been really fortunate along the way to have a lot of great teams behind me and win a lot of races and win a Cup championship and two in Xfinity. I feel very lucky to be on the list. It’s a big honor.”
What does it mean to you and the team to get a points win under your belt this early in the season?
“We started with the Clash win. It was really big for us. I know that it’s not a points event and all that, but just for us with last year really struggling on short tracks, I feel like we put a huge effort together this offseason to be prepared for this year, to really put in an effort and talk about the things that we needed to do better from last year. I think our whole team was really motivated to get better and to do whatever we needed to do and really communicated a lot about the things we needed to work on. So, really, the Clash was a big deal to get, and it gave us a lot of confidence. Even though the past couple years had been really strong, until then it was a little up and down, but we still had a lot of confidence and felt like we were going in the right direction. I said I think it was this week that I feel really good about where we’re at and I feel like we’re ready to break loose and get on a run. We have some really good tracks coming up the next several weeks, with Kansas and Darlington the next two weeks in particular. Looking forward to this weekend with our Reser’s Fine Foods Camry and to see if we can get some more.”
What is racing at Kansas like, and what other track is most similar?
“I would say Kansas is a lot like Homestead but with a tri-oval. Similar corners and little bit of progressive banking. The wall has really come into play the last couple of years there since the asphalt has worn out. So, running high is very important there, and also momentum is very important at Kansas. You have a big, wide front straightaway that gives you the option to make big bold moves on the restarts where it can get pretty wild there. Kansas is definitely high on my list of places I like to race and we are hoping for a great weekend there with our Reser’s Fine Foods Camry.”
There’s a lot of variety in the schedule now – you go from short tracks, to dirt, to concrete, to road courses, and this week to a 1.5-mile oval. How do you take on the challenge of the variety of tracks you go to in the Cup Series?
“I feel like the schedule nowadays is all over the place with all the road courses we have, it’s just that every week is so different and you have to do your homework and study and think back to last year and past races just to remind ourselves. We have really short practices now, so you don’t get a lot of time to get dialed in and get comfortable, and not getting in that rhythm and just getting the car dialed in. We don’t have a lot of time and we need to show up and be ready to go. For the most part, I’ve been doing to these tracks for quite a while now and you lean on that past experience a lot.”
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