DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — It was our day for a while, but at the end it wasn’t. That’s superspeedway racing with a lot of things out of your control.
I kept on saying throughout the week that you need three things to be successful in the Daytona 500 – speed, luck and being in position at the end.
Well, we didn’t quite have the speed to keep up with those guys up front but we were in position near the end to nail a solid finish. And we even had some luck during the race as I was able to narrowly avoid a couple of the accidents.
But that luck factor turned against us at the end. We got caught up in a multicar wreck with two laps remaining and that pretty much sealed our fate.
Our No. 78 Bass Pro Shops/5-hour Energy Toyota suffered heavy damage in that wreck and I had to come down pit road for repairs. That put us two laps down, and from that point on, all I could do was limp to the checkered flag with a crippled race car to finish a disappointing 18th.
We were running second when the race was restarted with seven laps to go. I got shuffled out of the top 10 and then hung back knowing that there was most likely going to be another wreck with the frontrunners.
Sure enough the wreck did happen but I just couldn’t avoid making contact as cars were spinning every which way. We gave it our best shot, running a strategic race to compensate for some of our issues. But in the end it just wasn’t in the cards for our Furniture Row Racing team.
There was plenty of disappointment out there today as a number of quality teams took an early exit due to accidents. The aggressive racing throughout the race didn’t surprise me. We all came here to win and being aggressive is part of the deal.
I guess the only good news for us is that we managed to pick up 11 stage points with finishes of fifth in Stage 1 and sixth in Stage 2. Those bonus points lifted us to 10th in the driver point standings. That is an improvement of seven positions after our last year’s 17th-place standing following the Daytona 500.
While the Daytona 500 is considered the biggest race of the year, it will be next weekend’s race at the 1.5-mile Atlanta Speedway that will tell us where we stand against the competition. We sure had success at the 1.5-mile tracks last year with seven wins.
For us, the Daytona 500 is in the rear-view mirror and it’s on to Atlanta.
Furniture Row Racing’s Martin Truex Jr., driver of Denver’s No. 78 car, is keeping a diary for The Denver Post through the Daytona 500 on Sunday.