Spotter Truex Jr. fired helps McDowell to Daytona 500 win

Martin Truex Jr. and the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team have some egg on their faces.

Truex, winless in his NASCAR Cup Series career at superspeedways, replaced spotter Clayton Hughes with Drew Herring during the off season. Hughes joined Front Row Motorsports during the off-season.

First race out and Hughes took Michael McDowell to a Daytona 500 win – i.e. a Superspeedway.

And for Truex Jr.? The #19 ended up in the scrap heap at the end of the 500.

The Daytona 500 that that his former spotter wasn’t to blame for Truex’s superspeedway struggles. He was.

“I’ve got a list of things I’ve been working on,” he said, via Catchfence. “I brought in a change in spotter this year to try to be better at speedways, which is now … you look at the 550 (horsepower) package, basically speedway racing on restarts for a few laps.

“Things like that, we’ve been working on to get better at. It’s everything. It takes all of that to win these races. They are very difficult to win. We look at every avenue.”

Too funny.