Martin Truex Jr. has had his fair share of problems in 2020. The 2017 Cup Series champion is off to one of his worst starts to a year since 2014. The problem with that is, all of his and his teams faults are either self inflicted or due to tough adjustments to setups.

In Vegas and Fontana, their issues stemmed from problems on pit road. In Phoenix, he was crashed with Aric Almirola. In Charlotte, his car struggled in dirty air.

It not like they don’t have speed. They’ve arguably been the top Toyota team this season, they just can’t close out a race. Take this stat for what it’s worth, Truex has finished in the top five all but once in every second stage of every race run this season, yet has no top fives all year either. That tells you that he has a good race car to stay up front for the final half of the race, he just can’t close.

Then, look at his finishes in those races. 32nd, 20th, 14th, 32nd, sixth, 10th, sixth and ninth respectively.

On Thursday night in Charlotte, they couldn’t grasp a handle on their car until it was too late.

“It was quite a battle, Truex said. “We started the race and made a few little changes to try to be better. We tried to figure out what we needed to be a little better than the other night and we started the race and we were just crazy loose. Honestly, that’s really the whole story. It was undrivable sideways for the first two stages and we just kept taking big swings at it. Finally, I fired off for that long run in the third stage and the Bass Pro Shops Camry was pretty good. We started passing cars and making up some ground. We just continued to chug our way forward the whole time. We never gave up on it, we worked hard and salvaged something. I think we’re all a little baffled on how we could have been that far off after how good we were Sunday. We definitely need to go back to the shop and figure some things out.

There’s your problem. Also, I don’t expect it to change Sunday either. Truex, only has one top five in his last 15 Bristol starts, the site of Sunday’s race. He’s finished 20th or worse in his last 13 tries on the Tennessee oval. His last top five there? 2012.