Martin Truex Jr. entered this season with three career Sprint Cup wins to his credit. He’s already more than doubled that — and by winning some of the series premier events.
This year, Truex dominated the competition in the prestigious Coca-Cola 600. He won the coveted Southern 500. He made the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
And then he went out and won two of the opening three races in that format.
MORE: Check out the Chase field | Winners and losers from Dover
Now he sets his sites on Charlotte once more, a track where he led 392 of 400 laps in May. The series returns there on Saturday night — and crew chief Cole Pearn certainly isn’t taking anything for granted despite the team’s success there earlier this year.
"You can't get complacent and hold onto fond memories from the past or whatever," he said. "You've got to go and execute and work really hard this week. We've got a tough week coming up for our team. We've got a tight turnaround going to Charlotte. We've got to test Martinsville Tuesday and Wednesday, so I mean, it's a really tight week, and we're nervous about that.
"But at the end of the day, it's definitely a track where we have good comfort with. I think we know what we need to do, it's just a matter of executing it and having it all go together over 500 miles."
Now, he has the kind of momentum that is leading others to point to him as the championship favorite.
It’s quite a rally for the driver competing for a team located in Colorado, albeit one with an alliance with the formidable Joe Gibbs Racing group this season.
Still, for many weeks it looked like this would be a season of heartbreak for Truex. A variety of setbacks, including pit-road problems, robbed him of apparent wins in races where he’d led a stunning amount of laps.
MORE: Truex dominates at Dover | Stewart eliminated from Chase
He has, though, led quite a few laps this season — 1,594, to be exact.
And not all of those resulted in wins. At Texas in April, he led 141 laps but older tires proved to be his undoing. At Kansas in May, he led 172 laps before he had a loose wheel after pitting and had to make a second stop after which the team discovered a bolt had broken. At Pocono in June, he was involved in a scary pit-road collision. At Richmond in September, he finished second after leading 193 laps. At New Hampshire in September, he again spent much of his day at the front, leading 141 laps, but finished seventh.
These days, Truex seems to be in the running for the win every week.
And that is something his Chase contenders should certainly be noting. As to Truex himself, he struggles to define exactly what is the difference for his team of late.
"It's just clicking," he said. "… Honestly, I feel like all season long we've been the same team, and we've done the same things. You know, I guess right now it's just our time. You know, throughout the summer, we led so many laps and had so many great race cars and so many great weekends (and) ... things would happen.
"Sometimes it was just rotten luck, sometimes it was mistakes or just circumstances that didn't play out."
MORE: Charlotte race weekend schedule
But the team didn’t let that rattle them. Now it’s paying off.
"We stayed focused on the things that truly matter, and when all that bad luck went away, here we are," he said. "I mean, it's just been amazing."
Truex and his team need to keep that going.
It’s a fresh start for the remaining Chase drivers, with only three races before the field is cut again. The points have been reset, so the 12 drivers are once more essentially even.
How does Truex keep the momentum?
"We've just got to go out there each week and try to be as prepared as we can," he said Sunday night after his win. "We're not going to change who we are. We didn't do that before the Chase started. We just got hot and we got momentum, and hopefully we don't lose it.
"I don't know how we got it, I don't know how to keep it, I just know that I think we're going to continue to approach these races the same way, and hopefully it works out for us."