Martin Truex Jr., Furniture Row thriving under Toyota banner

After an offseason switch in manufacturers, Martin Truex Jr. and Furniture Row Racing figured it would be a few months before the team that advanced to the championship race last year exhibited the same form in 2016.

The expectation was that by late spring, early summer Truex would be competitive and regularly challenging for victories again. It was just time in for a push to solidify a spot in NASCAR’s Chase for the Sprint Cup playoff. It was a blueprint that made sense, as Furniture Row’s budding relationship with Toyota and a newly formed technical alliance with Joe Gibbs Racing needed time to congeal.

But the adjustment period that was expected to initially slow Truex hasn’t occurred. Furniture Row’s transition from Chevrolet to Toyota has been seamless, with the single-car team quickly adapting. In fact, on the track he and Furniture Row have never been better -- even before a record-breaking performance Sunday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

By slimmest of margins, Truex lost the season-opening Daytona 500 to quasi-teammate Denny Hamlin. He led 141 laps in April at Texas Motor Speedway and earlier this month 172 laps at Kansas Speedway, though victory slipped away in each instance due to strategy (Texas) and bad luck (Kansas). He was also well positioned to win on May 15 at Dover International Speedway, but didn’t when Jimmie Johnson’s mechanical failure triggered an 18-car pileup that included Truex, who then said he felt like punching something due to his misfortune.

Repeatedly coming close but failing to win made it appear as if Truex couldn’t close out. Somehow, someway races he should have won going away would instead be lost due to a either failure or bad luck.

That narrative changed drastically thanks to an overpowering victory on Sunday, with Truex steamrolling to Victory Lane leading a NASCAR-record 588 of 600 miles. So dominant was the No. 78, the competition acknowledged just how little of a chance it actually stood.

“They have had a few runs where they have just been the class of the field and things have kept them from Victory Lane,” third-place finisher Jimmie Johnson said. ”(Sunday) he wasn’t going to be denied, there was no way around that.

“I kind of felt like he was playing with us. He was so fast.”

Behind Toyota’s recruitment of Furniture Row was that the carmaker sought a second team with the potential to win consistently. The partnership between JGR and the now-defunct Michael Waltrip Racing never formed the way Toyota desired, and Furniture Row represented a chance to finally develop that cohesiveness.

“We would not be where we are at all right now without Toyota and Joe Gibbs Racing,” Furniture Row owner Barney Visser said. “That’s huge for us. We think we add something to all of that, and we obviously share all of our information with them.”

Thus far, it’s had the desired effect. Truex and crew chief Cole Pearn have been welcomed as equals by their counterparts within the JGR camp, with both sides engaging in a continuous flow of information. Truex’s Charlotte win gave Toyota its eighth in 13 races this season, while its five main drivers (Truex, Hamlin, Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth) have combined to lead 62 percent of all laps.

“The addition of (Furniture Row) into our stable has helped,” Hamlin said. “That’s more information -- that’s another great crew chief and another great driver that we get to pull information and data from. It’s all just working at this point.”

Furniture Row has provided Toyota with exactly what it wanted: another organization with realistic title aspirations. Truex fell just short of the title in 2015, doing so with little factory support from Chevrolet. Even better this season, there is every reason to think he’ll contend once again.

“We want to win championships,” Truex said. “We want to win races. We want to win every single week. ... If we can keep this thing going, we can do some special things.”