Not even a poorly timed caution that took away his track position could stop Martin Truex Jr. at Sonoma Raceway.
The veteran driver of the No. 19 Toyota had the best car on the track Sunday (June 11) and won his second NASCAR Cup Series race of the season at the Toyota/Save Mart 350.
It’s his fourth win at the Southern California road course.
Truex had to fend off a strategy play by Chase Elliott and a charging Kyle Busch to seal it, though, and seal it he did. Truex built a three-plus-second lead en route to the checkered flag.
“Just a hats off to my team, James, Jazzy and all the guys,” Truex told FOX Sports. “To be so bad here last year and come back and do that with the same car basically is really unbelievable.
“Just proud of them, we’re having a great year and I feel really good about our team.”
Busch finished second, and Joey Logano, Chris Buescher and Elliott rounded out the top five.
“Just wish we had a little bit more; I tried there really hard at the end to at least try and keep Martin honest,” Busch said. “I felt like I could beat him a little bit on a lap and then I would mess up and he’d beat me by a little more on the next lap, so we were just kind of trading a little bit there but then we was able to pull away.”
AJ Allmendinger finished sixth. Michael McDowell, who was in contention for the win before the final caution, had a bad pit stop and ended seventh.
Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell and Ross Chastain completed the top 10.
Pole sitter Denny Hamlin was the cause of the second and final caution of the day after hitting both the inside and outside wall, and he was the only car not to finish the event.
The only other caution of the day came when Zane Smith’s crew lost a tire from its pit box that rolled out onto pit road at lap 50.
Cup Sonoma Results
After an off week, the Cup Series returns at Nashville Superspeedway Sunday, June 25. Coverage begins at 7 p.m. ET on NBC, Sirius XM NASCAR Radio and PRN.
About the author
A daily email update (Monday through Friday) providing racing news, commentary, features, and information from Frontstretch.com
We hate spam. Your email address will not be sold or shared with anyone else.
Another excruciatingly boring road race. The best part of the day is that it was Fox’s last Cup broadcast until next year.
I’d rather have a race like that than one where there’s four restarts in the last 20 laps and the finishing order ends up being random compared to how each team ran during most of the race.
I have to add… “Pole sitter Denny Hamlin was the cause of the second and final caution of the day after hitting both the inside and outside wall, and he was the only car not to finish the event.”
Haw-haw!!!
So I take it, you are looking forward to all the screeching commentators trying to talk over each other all at once, saying three times as many words as necessary to get their point across