NASCAR at Kentucky recap: Martin Truex Jr., Furniture Row Racing continue to build championship resume

Martin Truex Jr.’s third season of the season sets him up nicely for a deep playoff run later in the year.

Twice Kyle Larson went from the back to the front, passing competitors low, high and even sometimes through the middle. Ninety green-flag passes in total. All on a track that had some drivers wailing about what they perceived as an insufficient car that didn’t allow them to best showcase their abilities.

But while Larson flashed the talent to further justify the comparisons to Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, he had a supporting role Saturday night at Kentucky Speedway. The unquestioned star was Martin Truex Jr., who in sweeping all three stages led a race-high 152 laps and was never seriously challenged.

Truex’s superiority was such he routinely built up multi-second advantages during regulation. Second-place finisher Kyle Busch was 14 seconds behind Truex when Kurt Busch, Kyle’s older brother, had a fiery engine failure with two laps remaining setting up an overtime finish.

The caution not only negated Truex’s sizable lead, it placed Cole Pearn in the position no crew chief wants to find themselves in a late-race situation: To pit or not to pit for fresh tires. Whatever decision Pearn chose, those trailing Truex would undoubtedly do the opposite.

“Damned if we do, damned if we don’t,” Pearn told NBCSN as Truex circled the track under caution.

Pearn never wavered, decisively keeping Truex on the track. Considering tire wear was at a minimum on Kentucky’s recently repaved surface, making track position paramount, and how strong the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Toyota was, Pearn’s decision was sound.

Nonetheless Truex fretted the decision.

"I thought we were dead," Truex said. "I thought we were done. It's just completely unbelievable."

Truex never questioned Pearn, underscoring the close relationship between driver and crew chief. A bond born over the past three years by extraordinary performance few teams have been able to match. Truex’s eight wins -- three this season, four in 2016, and one in 2015 -- is fourth-best during that span.

Truex advanced to the four-driver championship finale in 2015 and was expected to do so a year ago before an untimely engine failure in the round two elimination race at Talladega Superspeedway caused his title aspirations to sputter out prematurely.

Another deep playoff run is the expectation this season. To aid their postseason chances Truex and Pearn have used NASCAR’s revised playoff structure to build up a safeguard. Because of their dominance where Truex has scored three times as many stage wins (13) as next-best Kyle Busch (4), Truex has already amassed 28 bonus points that will be added to this sum in each of the first three playoff rounds.

How this exactly works out come the postseason is still to be determined. Of course the new system will bring various quirks no one thought about when the system was conceived.

Yet on the surface Truex’s 28 bonus points looms large. At a minimum, it provides him a backup where a single bad result similar to the one at Talladega doesn’t trigger a playoff knockout.

“You can’t have enough [playoff points],” Pearn said. “I mean, the best way to get a lead is to keep winning them and not let other people win them. … The more we can get, the better.”

Then again, with how well Truex is driving and the magic Pearn possesses in unearthing speed out the No. 78 car, they might not even need a mulligan.

All three of Truex’s wins this season have been on mile-and-a-half speedways, the same sized tracks composing half of the 10-race playoff schedule -- including the championship finale Nov. 19 at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Formability is his main competition, Larson readily acknowledges, even though he leads Truex by a single point in the regular season standings.

“Martin was super-fast and [has] been really, really fast all year long,” said Larson, who finished second at Kentucky. “I think we've been second best to him, but he's in a whole other league right now.”

That much was evident Saturday night -- and has been the case throughout the entire season.