Truex puts ugly 2014 in the rearview

— -- AVONDALE, Ariz. -- After the final race of the Sprint Cup season, Martin Truex Jr. and girlfriend Sherry Pollex would get in the car and hook a left off the Homestead-Miami Speedway property.

They would wind through the back roads on their way to the highway or to the keys. Quiet roads. Relaxing roads. Dark roads sandwiched between palm trees and various crops with not a soul for miles. On that drive, Truex and Pollex would talk with amazement about just how fast another season went by.

They didn't have that peaceful, reflective moment in 2014, a long and frustrating year Truex calls his worst on and off the racetrack. Pollex had spent the previous several months at home battling ovarian cancer. Truex had finished a career-worst 24th in the standings with five top-10s, his fewest top-10s in a season since his five in 2006 as a rookie.

Truex plans to take that road this November when leaving Homestead.

"Hopefully this year we're doing it later at night and we're celebrating it with some trophies," Truex said.

That's a bold -- unrealistic? -- statement from a driver who has won just two Cup races in nine seasons, made the Chase for the Sprint Cup only twice in his career and never finished top 10 in the standings. But with the start he has had in 2015, few would argue that Truex has reason to at least feel optimistic, to at least feel his career heads in the direction many thought it would after his back-to-back Busch (Xfinity) Series titles in 2004 and 2005.

Off the track, treatment for Pollex has gone well.

"Everything is good," Truex said. "Back to normal."

On the track, everything might be better than normal. He has opened the season with three consecutive top-10 finishes in his No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Chevrolet -- an eighth at Daytona, a sixth at Atlanta and a second at Las Vegas. He sits fourth in the standings. Truex will start 15th Sunday in the CampingWorld.com 500 at Phoenix International Raceway (3:30 p.m. ET, Fox) in a race that will tell him if his team has improved as much on the shorter tracks as it has on the 1.5-mile tracks of Atlanta and Vegas.

The improvement stems from a change in the foundation -- the race cars. Truex won't delve into details, but he gives a blunt assessment of what life was like in 2014 with an organization coming off its first Chase appearance with driver Kurt Busch.

"From the first time I got into their car in testing, I knew something wasn't right," Truex said in a candid interview following a test Wednesday at Charlotte Motor Speedway. "I couldn't touch the gas [because of a poor-handling car]. Every week, I couldn't touch the gas, couldn't touch the gas, couldn't touch the gas. I was like, 'Something is wrong.' I just could not get the power down ever.

"We went through all kind of different things and it was just super inconsistent. ... If you ever watched a dog chase his tail in circles, that was us at least the first half of the year."

The team had plenty of fire and fight to get it right. But finger-pointing tends to come naturally in that situation, especially for an organization that had just finished in the top 10 the previous year with Kurt Busch, setting a new standard for a single-car team in this era of multicar organizations.

In its nine years as a race team, Furniture Row never really had a year when it showed a significant decline.

"We just couldn't put our finger on anything," Truex said. "We couldn't gain any momentum. And it was, 'Martin, maybe you need to drive it like this' and 'Well, maybe we need to do this and you need to do this' and 'Here, keep looking at that data and see what these guys are doing.'

"Well, at the end of the day our race cars were messed up."

It took a long time to come to that conclusion. For more than half a season, everyone at Furniture Row wondered why Truex didn't have the speed Busch had a year earlier. Why, when he put Richard Childress Racing setups into his car (the organizations have an alliance), the car didn't feel anything close to as strong as the RCR cars. Why the team wasn't often successful when it tried to make adjustments throughout the race weekend.

"All of a sudden it came out [over the summer] that you know, these cars are different than what we raced last year," Truex said. "I was like, 'What do you mean?' And they were like, 'This is different.' I was like, 'Wow. OK. Why did we do that and why did we not talk about this before?'"

The team has junked and rebuilt cars. The voice atop the pit box has changed as Cole Pearn replaced Todd Berrier as crew chief. Truex stressed that he wanted Berrier to stay and said, "It's totally unfair to Todd to say the reason we're running well is because we changed crew chiefs."

How much of the blame goes to the driver? Truex beat Kyle Busch and Greg Biffle for the Busch Series title in 2004. He beat Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin and Clint Bowyer for the series title in 2005. He hasn't enjoyed the success of those drivers on the Cup level. He has made the Chase for the Sprint Cup twice.

"Martin has history -- we knew Martin could drive," said Furniture Row general manager Joe Garone. "That was not a question. It was a matter of literally are we ever going to find the combination to get him figured out of what it is he wants. ... You get to where you get pretty comfortable and afraid to make changes.

"I learned a lesson. You can't let grass grow on your feet. You've got to move quick."

Garone called 2014 a perfect storm of a new driver who wanted something different combined with a new rules package and the team not used to having to work through such a significant decline in performance. "Ultimately, we created the worst year of his life and ours," Garone said.

In some ways it wasn't as bad as some times when Truex had more bad luck than bad cars.

"You're madder when you're doing things right and stuff doesn't go your way than you are when you're just running bad," Truex said. "We just flat-out didn't do anything right. We didn't do anything right, period. ... Even in my worst seasons, there was always bright spots.

"Last year, there was no bright spots. Until the last 10 races, there was nothing that we could say that we did good other than never giving up."

Truex is used to tough times. He joined Dale Earnhardt Inc. in 2006 and the company soon spiraled downward. He won one race and made the Chase in his second full season (2007), but a year later the team merged with Chip Ganassi Racing. Truex finished 23rd in the standings in 2009 while at Ganassi and left for Michael Waltrip Racing as the driver replacement for team owner Waltrip.

After two more frustrating seasons, Truex blossomed in his third at MWR. He won a race in 2012 and finished 11th in the standings while teammate Bowyer had finished second in points. During the season, Truex signed a contract extension through 2015. A year later, he was looking for a ride and became what many consider an innocent victim in one of NASCAR's biggest controversies.

Truex battled to make the Chase on points in 2013, but after Bowyer spun and Brian Vickers came down pit road under green late in the regular-season finale at Richmond International Raceway, each driver was docked 50 points and the team was fined a record $300,000.

The points penalty -- issued because the actions of Bowyer and Vickers helped Truex earn one of the 16 Chase bids -- dropped Truex out of the Chase, and sent his career spiraling again as NAPA dropped its sponsorship of the team, which then had to scale back from three full-time cars to two.

"They were sort of getting their legs under them over at Michael's," said Dale Earnhardt Jr., "before all that went to hell."

After he lost his ride at MWR, Truex didn't take long to find work. Busch had announced he would leave Furniture Row for Stewart-Haas Racing, and the team found a Chase-experienced driver in Truex. It would have been the feel-good story of 2014 if Truex had performed well. He didn't.

"I certainly believe in Martin as a driver," said Earnhardt, who co-owned the Busch car that Truex drove to the titles. "He's a really easy-going guy. ... He's just fortunate enough this year to get some cars going in the right direction. He's pretty confident in what they did over the offseason to improve their company quite a bit."

Truex knows the driver gets the credit and the blame while much depends on the team. That's not just words from a driver who hasn't had the success many had predicted for him a decade ago.

"Resurgence of drivers and downward spiral of drivers, I hate to say it's mostly not because of the drivers," Hamlin said. "It's just because the teams are going through lulls or what have you or their manufacturer is.

"I think he's running to the full potential of what his cars are and right now they look like they have top-5 speed every week. That is more the resurgence of Truex is that he has a better machine under him than he's had over the last few years."

Truex expects to make the Chase for the first time in three years. Or is it the first time in two years?

"Twice," Truex said when asked how many times he made the Chase. "No, three times. Made it three times, got kicked out once [in 2013]. ... I don't think it was fair that we got kicked out and others got added."

Saying that more as a matter of fact than with bitterness, Truex swears he doesn't need to get into the Chase to put that 2013 season behind him.

"I need to make the Chase because this team is capable of it and I'm capable of it and I want to do it again," Truex said. "What happened in the past has nothing to do this year."

But what has happened in the past gives him the confidence he can do it, that he really could leave Homestead and take a left with Pollex beside him in the front seat and a Sprint Cup trophy strapped in the back.

"There's no reason I can't win races," Truex said. "There's no reason I can't be as good as the best out there or better. ... In the right situation, I can be the best out here.

"I know I can. And I plan on doing that because I have got a great team right now and I plan to take advantage of it."