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Late cautions keep Martin Truex Jr. from Las Vegas victory

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Martin Truex Jr. had a "winning car" at Las Vegas but things didn't work out for the No. 78 team despite bringing plenty of speed to the race track.

LAS VEGAS — Martin Truex Jr. avoided the carnage Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway but he still suffered the consequences.

With arguably the fastest car on a long run, Truex was undone by four cautions in the last 23 laps that helped Brad Keselowski score his third consecutive win. Truex finished third.

“Brad clearly found a horseshoe,” Truex said. “Three races in a row he’s won and he has not had the best car. I mean, if you want to really talk about the sport being what it is, you’ve got to look at that. I mean, obviously he hasn’t led the most laps in any of those races, and he showed up at the end with good pit stops and good short run speed.

“I think clearly it’s pretty obvious how it worked out. He’s hot right now. He’s on a streak. That’s the way it goes.”

Truex leaves Las Vegas with the points lead after an afternoon that saw six of the 16 playoff drivers involved in accidents or spins and a few others who finished with crinkled and creased cars.

Truex leads Kyle Busch, who spun during the race, by two points heading into Saturday’s race at Richmond Raceway.

All the incidents toward the end were too much to overcome for Truex.

“Man, all those restarts at the end, they were wicked, they were crazy,” Truex said on pit road with a wet towel around his neck after a 3-hour, 28-minute race in temperatures that hovered around 100 degrees outside the car and much hotter inside it.

“Everybody was going for it. Unfortunately for us, it took a little bit too long to get rolling. Too many cautions at the end. It really, really took our chance away from winning.”

The issue for Truex was that he and crew chief Cole Pearn set the car up for long runs.

“Hindsight 20/20 we would have worked more on being a little better on the short run,” Truex said. “For most of day it was pretty clear who had the dominant car.

“I think we had the best handling car on the long run. You don’t know how these things are going to play out. We felt it was going to be a long-run kind of race just because the track is slick and there are so many multiple grooves. Typically, these are the ones that go green for a long time. We were kind of banking on that and for a while it was working for us. Obviously, at the end it was caution after caution. That really took any chance we had away.”

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