The mystery that is Martin Truex Jr.

   Crew chief Pat Tryson (R) is reshaping Martin Truex Jr. into a title contender (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

    By Mike Mulhern
    mikemulhern.net

   CONCORD, N.C.
   A summer of cheap gas?!
   Hey, that's really good news for Sprint Cup tour promoters, predictions that gas may drop as low as $2.50 a gallon by July.
   And last weekend's surprisingly large crowd for NASCAR's annual All-Star race, maybe 100,000-plus, according to track officials, is also good news for men trying to sell tickets – and camping spots – to upcoming stock car events at Pocono, Michigan, San Francisco, Loudon NH, Daytona and Chicago.
   Maybe this 'Boys, have at it' is paying off at the gate.
   And certainly some of the action this season so far, in the first 12 races (of the 36) has been pretty darned good. Credit some of that perhaps to the new 'old' flat-blade rear spoiler, which is making these cars easier to handle in the corners.
   Add in some of those questions about what might be going on in the Joe Gibbs camp, with that Denny Hamlin-Kyle Busch tiff, and over at the Jimmie Johnson-Jeff Gordon shop and the Mark Martin-Dale Earnhardt Jr. shop, and the questions of what next for Hendrick newcomer Kasey Kahne, and Juan Pablo Montoya's tantalizing runs, and the curious comeback of the Richard Childress guys – is Childress looking to expand back to four Cup teams, and if so, with whom -- and it's shaping up as an interesting stretch ahead.
   While Charlotte Motor Speedway was strangely idle Friday – is NASCAR still trying to push promoter Bruton Smith to cut 600 Week back a day? – there is no shortage of action in town, with that downtown street festival stretching down to the new Hall of Fame, and Friday night's dirt sprints at The Dirt Track, right across the street from this place.
   One new question: what's suddenly up with Martin Truex Jr.?
   It's like somebody flipped a switch over at the shop....or maybe new crew chief Pat Tryson – one of the best in the business – is finally getting his own gear on line.
   Tryson moved over from the Kurt Busch-Roger Penske Dodge operation at the end of last season, in a move that caught Busch by surprise, word coming the first week of the 10-race championship playoffs. And Tryson must have brought his bag of tricks, because Truex is a top-12 driver this season.
   Truex, who turns 30 in a month, won last weekend's Showdown, to make the final row of the All-Star field....and then was nipping at Kurt Busch's heels in the final miles, in something of a surprise.
   Now he's got a second-row starting spot for Sunday's 600. "Business is picking up," Truex says with a grin.
   "We're really starting to click. 
    "I'm starting to have fun again, and it's been cool."
   

   Rob Kauffman (R) is back in town, for Sunday's 600, and when the moneyman's watching, it's time to perform (Photo: Michael Waltrip Racing)
   

    Truex is also new to the Waltrip camp, moving over this year after several lackluster seasons with DEI and Earnhardt-Ganassi.
    More incentive for Truex – the man who replaced him at Chip Ganassi's, Jamie McMurray, just won the Daytona 500 in that car and nearly won Darlington's Southern 500.
    Not to be lost in this equation – Kurt Busch, the man Tryson worked with at Penske's from 2007 through 2009 (scoring five tour wins together, and finishing fourth in last year's chase, in a major turnaround stretch for Penske), won the All-Star race.
    "Charlotte has always been a tough track for me, but I'm really starting to come around and warm up to it," Truex says.
    Indeed this 1-1/2-mile speedway is notoriously fickle, and its asphalt particularly heat-sensitive.  "It's going to change drastically," Truex says of the day-into-night 600, "and the guys who can stay on top of it, and have a car that is able to be adjusted, will be good."
   And Tryson has been quite good over the years at reading tracks.
   Truex has been something of an enigma during his four-plus seasons on the stock car tour. He's got only one Cup win, at Dover, in the summer of 2007. This spring he's only led six of the 4,153 possible laps, and his best runs have been a fifth at Martinsville, seventh at Richmond, and ninth at Texas.
   But then two weeks at Dover, after a long run of very mediocre qualifying performances, he won the pole (and finished 12th).
   Then he almost stole the All-Star show....
   Now Truex is starting to look like a real player again.
   This comes just as the rest of the teams in the Cup garage are scratching their heads about the sudden resurgence of the Joe Gibbs operation, with Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch and Joey Logano.
   Since Truex is also running Toyotas, maybe there's more to the Gibbs' guys runs lately (five wins in the last seven tour events) than just Mark Cronquist's engines and all the work by crew chiefs Mike Ford, Dave Rogers and Greg Zipadelli.
   The Toyota camp has been divided into two worlds since Gibbs changed from Chevrolet: the Gibbs guys, who pretty much keep to themselves, especially in the engine department, and the rest of the guys, who are more under the arm of Toyota's own racing division TRD.
    Now, though, it looks like things are changing.
    In fact, a tipoff might be the prominent appearance here of Michael Waltrip's European business partner, Rob Kauffman.
    When Waltrip's fledgling empire appeared to be going down the tubes a couple years back, with economic woes mounting, and technological challenges seemingly too much to bear, Waltrip found Kauffman and signed him on.
   An odd pairing, to be sure, Kauffman living in London as an investment wheeler-dealer, with an office in Rome, http://www.fortressinv.com/ .
   But Kauffman is such a car guy that he even has a sideline shop just three miles from this track,  http://www.rk-collection.com/ ...right over by the NASCAR R&D shop and the Jack Roush complex.
    And Kauffman, fortunately for Waltrip, is a patient man in this venture, which came out of the blue three years ago. (Just like wealthy international sportsman George Gillett...though Kauffman seems a lot more 'user-friendly' than the sometimes brusque, and rarely seen Gillett.)
    Ironically Kauffman just missed last spring's rain-delayed 600 win by David Reutimann, because he had to get back to the office.
    Certainly having  the big moneyman on hand here this weekend isn't lost on the team.
    And this would be a nice point in his career for Truex to make a rebound.
   "This has been a lot of momentum-in-progress for us," Truex says.  "We have been constantly chipping away at it...
   "It's still an awfully new team."
   

   

 
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   Denny Hamlin, Saturday's All-Star: Looks like Joe Gibbs' guys have found some new tricks, and they're turning the stock car tour around (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)