Martin Truex Jr. ‘pissed’ about NASCAR midweek penalty reports
By Nick Tylwalk
The defending Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion is a little upset about the continuous string of penalty announcements — and when they take place.
The way you hear him talk about them, you’d think that Martin Truex Jr. had been hit by one of the increasingly common NASCAR L1 penalties.
He hasn’t been, but the reigning NASCAR Cup Series champion is still frustrated by them, and he wasn’t shy about expressing that in the wake of a week that saw the XFINITY Series race winner and the second and third-place Cup Series finishers at Dover slapped with penalties that led to them being stripped of points.
On SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (via NBC Sports), Truex explained his view that it makes NASCAR and the sport look bad.
"I get frustrated over Wednesday. We get all these stories about this guy was illegal, that guy was illegal. From the fans’ point of view, they think ‘Oh everybody is cheating. This is ridiculous. I’m pissed. I don’t want to talk about this on a Wednesday,’ or ‘I don’t want to watch racing because all these guys are frauds.’ That’s kind of what people, a lot of our fans are thinking."
He went on to state that while he understood the position that NASCAR is in regarding a level playing field — this is “stock” car racing, after all — he didn’t feel that some of the things teams were being penalized for made all that much of a difference in where their cars finished. Indeed, Truex is echoing the thoughts of Kevin Harvick in that regard, as he maintained that his own L1 penalty for a rear window issue at Las Vegas made absolutely no difference.
Harvick’s teammate Clint Bowyer and Daniel Suarez got their penalties for very similar violations after Dover. But it’s a bit of a no-win situation, because if fans and media members see cars with obvious abnormalities like Harvick’s car had, they naturally question whether everything is on the level with it.
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So maybe the answer is getting things done faster. Only NASCAR knows for sure whether offenses that can lead to L1 penalties can be sniffed out before midweek. If they can, it sure would be nice if something changed for next season so this kind of thing didn’t keep happening. Otherwise, it’s not going to just be Truex who’s ticked off.