Martin Truex Jr. was in the zone for Monday’s rain delayed Crayon 301 at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. He swept both stages and led a race-high 254 of 301 laps in the process. However, when you have a car that good, it’s hard to decide what changes to make over the course of a 301 lap event.

The car isn’t going to remain perfect. Normally, the track changes too as more rubber gets laid down, the sun beats down on it longer and marbles begin to build.

Plus, with being that dominant, the competition is adjusting on their cars all day to catch you. If you just sit back and don’t touch it, that could cost you in the end. However, if you do touch it, one change the wrong direction could take you from a potential win to out of the top five all together.

Plus, how do you tell the team what you want in the car for the end when it’s reacting so good at the present?

“You just never know in these races,” Truex said. “Guys get better all day long. Everybody works on their car. Our car was so good you don’t really know what to do to make it better, and sometimes guys start catching up because you’re afraid to do anything.”

Truex said that this is something that’s caught him out in the past so they decided to just do some small adjustments to counter but not go too far.

“That’s bit us here in the past. Today we were able to just make real small adjustments and the track didn’t really change that much but the groove changed a ton,” he continued. “I cannot believe where we were running at the end of that race, like in that old pavement way up high. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever done here.

“Pretty cool that it kind of moved around and worked out that way and our car, we were able to just run anywhere. Yeah, just a super good race car that was very maneuverable and could run different lanes, was good in traffic. I could pass cars and do what I needed.

“I don’t know, I’ve had really good cars in the past at other places, and this place here you get out front, track position is a big deal, and we were able to take advantage of that today.”

Crew chief James Small noted that having a car as good as theirs was is also more stressful for him on the pit box. Sometimes it’s easier knowing what to tinker with and fix rather than guessing.

“It’s kind of tougher, to be honest,” he said. “It’s your race to lose in a way. I feel like that happened to us last year, and I’ve thought about it every day since.

“I was up last night stressing about it for ages, thinking of all the different scenarios. Once we got through doing what we did and being slightly conservative, just taking the four tires and being able to get back in front, but I knew at the end, that was the only call to make because so many people were going to do it, and we would have been buried if we had taken four.

“Yeah, it’s definitely more difficult, but yeah, thankfully it worked out for us today.”