Truex has improvements in EGR's 'newer' Chevrolets

A month ago, Earnhardt Ganassi Racing teammates Martin Truex Jr. and Aric Almirola were together in the Texas Motor Speedway garage area, doing their best to tune their respective Chevrolets.

Friday at Richmond International Raceway, Truex was tuning his No. 1 EGR Impala for a fourth-place qualifying run for Saturday night's Crown Royal 400 while Almirola wandered the infield trying to find some way to get back into a race car.

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Truex had his black Chevrolet stylishly at or near the top of both Sprint Cup Series practice reports. EGR's lead driver was quickest in the first 90-minute session, a scant hundredth of a second better than Ryan Newman's Stewart-Haas Chevrolet. In the second practice, Truex led at halfway before ending up seventh behind the most recent Richmond race winner, Jimmie Johnson.

After Happy Hour, Truex raved about the actuality of him and his EGR teammate, Juan Montoya, finally having at least a version of a "common car." Prior to going out west to Phoenix, EGR tested a car at New Smyrna Speedway in Florida that had a front clip developed by Ganassi Racing and a firewall-back chassis from Dale Earnhardt Inc.

According to Truex, the results were stunning, and the proof came in his season-best seventh-place finish at Phoenix.

"I went out in [Montoya's] car and I loved it," Truex said. "So we put their front end on ours and went out to Phoenix and man, right off the truck we were second-quick and had a great day. We didn't qualify good [26th] but we had a great race."

At Texas, Truex had spoken well of a season's worth of great communication with both of his teammates, but at the same time said that if they had even slightly different chassis, something was getting lost in the translation. No more.

"It's their front clip and our tail section, but all of the front-end geometry is the same, and that's the important stuff," Truex said. "All the rest of it is just to bolt stuff onto, at least that's what I feel." (Continued)