“This race looks like a NASCAR Heat 5 open lobby race” was a common take all race during the NASCAR Cup Series this race weekend at Martinsville. A lot of cautions and many, many, beat up cars made this race a true Martinsville race as they advertised, beating and banging and good racing.
In the opening stages of the race, that started at night time was exciting but eventually mother nature won the race track and the drivers went away to their haulers for the night. Once racing resumed on Sunday Denny Hamlin seemed to be the easy favorite to win. With other top contenders racing hard behind him Denny had a lot of time to pull away and ran all the way out to a 1 second lead at points. Blaney and Elliott behind him raced hard but eventually Blaney would get to Denny Hamlin and managed to sweep the stages.
Lurking in the back for the first 2 stages was a driver who has become somewhat of a short track ace in the past couple of years after not managing a win on a short track in his whole career. Martin Truex Jr. was the fastest car on the track by far but did not show it at all and saved all of his stuff for the end. That is a light term, MTJ was the best but he was not fighting for the race lead like other contenders like Hamlin, Blaney, Elliott and for a little while Bowman was looking decent. Martin stayed in 3rd place and stayed in his lane without getting into a lot of issues, which is hard to do at the paper clip.
Eventually Martin would get past his Joe Gibbs team mate and pull away for the rest of the race. Not really facing any more issues Martin would take the checkered flag and do a 10/10 burnout to cap off an amazing race for him and the #19 team. This would make MTJ the first 2 time winner but would still see him 2nd in points behind the insanely consistent Hamlin and is looking to create a good battle for the top of the standings going into Richmond.
The Slow Restart 