Major Martin: Truex Jr. off Harvick to win Southern 500

Despite a roller coaster of a regular season, Martin Truex Jr. deserves recognition as a legitimate title contender.

Given the assortment of happenstances that have combined to derail many potential Truex victories, the natural inclination when he took the lead with 16 laps remaining in Sunday’s Southern 500 was to assume something would occur to keep him out of Darlington Raceway’s victory lane.

Truex won a late race off pit road and led the final 12 laps en route to his second win of the season.

After winning his second race of the season, Martin Truex Jr. has confidence heading into the Chase. He was called pass-through penalty after his crew made a modification on pit road NASCAR didn’t like, then fell two laps down. Those three tracks all host Chase events, as does Homestead-Miami Speedway where the championship will be decided between four drivers on November 20. Now Gordon will be the driver to channel the Grey Ghost and try to get to victory lane at Darlington for the eighth time at the track.

It is also his fifth career victory in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Harvick worked his way back to second, but couldn’t reel in Truex who had his auto at it’s best when it mattered. I’ve led a lot of laps here in my career. “The pit crew was flawless tonight – they won the race”.

“I wish it would happen a lot more often”.

“I feel bad. We’ve changed people there”. “We’ve been one of the fastest cars if not the fastest cars all summer long”. “A big thank you to Toyota and TRD (Toyota Racing Development) and everybody that makes this thing happen – it’s just an awesome partnership, incredible teammates over at Joe Gibbs Racing that we share information with”.

Truex was quick to praise his pit crew.

To be honest they haven’t really led a ton of laps and they haven’t had a ton of speed so you were wondering, ‘OK.

“We’ve had a string of awful bad luck lately”, Truex said in Victory Lane.

“Our team in the garage did a great job”, Harvick said. That pretty much summed up tonight. “Just the dominant vehicle, and just three bad stops on pit road”. So far, he’s earned a Daytona 500 and a road course victory; a second Southern 500 would be nice to add to the trophy case in 2016.

“This is weird. I’m home right now”, Logano said Friday. Troubles on pit road ended his shot to win.

So therefore, if you make a mistake at all you’re going to hit the wall and you’ve got 39 people out there trying to do it better than you. Kyle Larson also flirted with the lead after stealing it from Denny Hamlin with 83 laps to go. Carl Edwards, the defending champion, will start third. “The history, the tradition here, to see the Hall of Famers before the race, and talked to Cale Yarborough and all those guys, it’s just awesome”.

“We have championship cars and we’re just mediocre on pit road”, said Harvick.

The live video stream of NASCAR from NBC is provided as an extension of NBC sports coverage of the race and make is easy for race fans to watch a live stream online and follow all of the action from Darlington on their tablets, computers and smart phones.

With the voting closed as of 4 p.m. ET Monday, the results are in – with a total of 57 percent of the voters agreeing that it was a “good” or “great” race.