As restart ruckus continues, Martin Truex Jr. moves on from Richmond: 'It's water under the bridge'

MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Martin Truex Jr. said Saturday that he has moved on after the conclusion to last weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Richmond Raceway, saying that teammate Denny Hamlin’s restart tactics and the maddening nature of the finish caused his temper to boil.

“No, it’s water under the bridge. I mean, it’s a race, it’s over,” Truex said after Saturday’s qualifying session for Sunday’s Cook Out 400 (3 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at Martinsville Speedway. “It’s … I was frustrated. It’s aggravating to lead an entire race, dominate a race and then have it go away that way, because I think that’s like the fifth or sixth time it’s happened to Richmond. So you just get aggravated, and it all piles on in a short amount of time in just 10 or 15 minutes, and I clearly lost my cool and did some things I’m probably not proud of, but you move on, you go to next week, and you hope you come out on top and do a better job.”

Last Sunday’s finish and the last green flag that preceded it kept the conversation rolling through the week about restarts and the regulations around them as the Cup Series loads in for the eighth event of the season and the 151st race meet at the historic Virginia half-mile. The cool temperatures in the commonwealth’s foothills this weekend have been offset by the heat of the spotlight on the restart zone, marked off outside Turn 4’s exit just before the field reaches the start/finish line.

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Last weekend, Hamlin’s No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota accelerated just before the white line that opens the restart zone, getting the jump on Truex’s No. 19 entry as the green flag unfurled for the final time at Richmond. Hamlin drove away in the final two-lap sprint to his second Cup Series victory of the season, leaving Truex to bemoan another Richmond would-be victory that eluded him.

Post-race, Truex took exception to Hamlin’s jump but also his teammate’s brushing past as he worked to keep the lead through Turns 1 and 2. Saturday, Truex said that the two had hashed out that conflict.

“It was just fine. He didn’t do anything wrong,” Truex said. “I just … like I said, it all just piled on really quickly and I lost my cool. It happens.”

That was also part of the explanation for Truex’s post-race bump with Kyle Larson after their overtime fender tag. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Truex said. “I mean, he slid up into me and I mean barely, barely got me in the side in (Turns) 1 and 2, and I just … the lid popped off.”

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Hamlin explained his side of his pre-emptive pounce Saturday, reiterating what he’d expressed on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast earlier in the week that his focus was on Truex’s car alongside him and challenger Joey Logano’s car behind him. Asked if he might’ve gotten away with a no-call, Hamlin agreed with that notion but said that the outcome would have been the same.

“Yeah, probably. Yeah, more than likely. But again, even if I go in the box, I don’t think the result changes at all,” said Hamlin, who controlled the restart as the leader when the caution period ended. “I kind of explained it on Monday that when I’m looking around at, you know, in the mirrors and through the side, I just know I’m in that vicinity, so I just kind of go when I feel it’s right to go. So obviously, when I look back at it, I was not as close to the box.”

Truex said that his opinion about the fateful Richmond restart hadn’t changed, six days later.

“I guess if you try to jump, don’t be surprised if they penalize you,” Truex said about his approach going forward. “I don’t know. You know, I don’t really understand, it’s a black-and-white rule. You go and you get to the box and you go. I don’t really understand what all the questions are about. You go before it, you should get penalized.”

Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, said Tuesday on FOX Sports’ “NASCAR Race Hub” that a review of late-race footage from different angles showed Hamlin’s jump. “He definitely fired before the zone, it looked like maybe a half a car length or so,” Sawyer said. “At the end of the race, making a split-second decision, we’ve got to get that call right. And with the information and data we had at the time, I still stand by the call we made at the track. If you are going to take a race win away, you’ve got to be 100 percent accurate and confident in the call.”

Drivers’ opinions were wide-ranging in the aftermath of Richmond, with the debate opening up about whether there was room for a gray-area judgment call in the black-and-white rule. The notion of a referee swallowing the whistle in a late-game moment and letting the outcome play out was mostly dismissed, but the flip side is a more rigid system.

“I think first and foremost, I really respected Elton Sawyer’s answer when he said they just missed it. I think that’s OK. I think that happens in sports,” Brad Keselowski said in a roundtable media appearance earlier this week. “Ideal scenario, we don’t have to ever put them in a position where an official has to make a decision. We have all the technology and all the things where everything is just black and white, but the world is not that perfect, and the technology to do everything is hard to ascertain and to make foolproof. So, sometimes things slip through the cracks and you get mad at ’em, and then a week later, everybody seems to forget about them. But I think holistically, you’d like to solve for challenges like that, just being careful that you don’t fall into the natural law of unintended consequences that seems to follow that.”

Keselowski noted how track-limits officiating, which was enforced at the Circuit of The Americas event last month using video footage and technology to flag drivers for short-cutting the road course’s esses section, produced 40 penalties in a national-series tripleheader weekend.

“I think COTA was a perfect example of how this can go the other way, where you have technology to solve challenges, you create black and white, remove some of the gray judgment calls, and people don’t like that either,” Keselowski said. “So I totally understand the challenge that those guys must face in trying to pick a path for this challenge. It’s the challenge of the weekend. And to be honest, if that’s the worst challenge we have coming out of Richmond, I think we probably had a pretty good week.”

Said Logano, the Richmond runner-up: “They’re making calls, I don’t know exactly how they do it. I feel like the technology is there to do it. From what we see, we all can go back on SMT (SportsMEDIA Technology telemetry data) and say, ‘well, there’s the restart line, and here’s where he fired.’ The eyeball test is pretty good, too. We’re able to see that. I feel like there’s plenty of technology available now that you can do that. I mean, I know it’s not fun to have black-and-white or ball-and-strike calls, right? Nobody wants to make those calls. So the more we can make it to where it’s black and white, the better. And the restarts sometimes are a little bit of ball and strike, but we’ve got to stay on ’em or else it becomes a Wild West on restarts.”

The opportunity for restarts this weekend may be relatively low as recent history suggests, with an average of 5.5 yellow flags in the last four Martinsville races. Last weekend’s race at Richmond, however, had just five caution periods — including the stage breaks — and just one well-timed yellow is all it takes to spark a debate.

Should Sunday’s 400-lapper wind down to another late-race reset, multiple drivers said that they’ll be extra mindful to avoid cutting a restart launch too close.

“Glad I’m not in the (scoring) tower making those calls,” said Alex Bowman, who starts 10th Sunday. “If it’s me, I think just try to not put yourself out there for a penalty and do the best you can obviously in the restart zone is probably the way to go about it now, since there are eyes on it. I feel like once you get eyes on those things, they’re probably going to make a call now would be my assumption.”