JOLIET, Ill. -- Martin Truex Jr. drove like a driver ticked off from the past two weeks, when he saw potential wins slip away.
How else would anyone describe how a driver could drive through the field after a speeding penalty, race from 13th to the lead after an unscheduled pit stop for loose lug nuts and still win by 7.2 seconds in the playoff-opening Tale of the Turtles 400 at Chicagoland Speedway?
But Truex wouldn't play that game of being totally motivated from the past, whether it was the tire blowing out as he was getting chased for the lead at Darlington or a late caution while he was leading that cost him at Richmond.
He instead looked out the windshield and played the game of motivation for the future.
"Last week was last week," Truex said. "We got over it by Monday or Tuesday and focused on Chicago.
"We're just trying to move forward and look forward each and every week and race one race at a time."
Truex knew a win would earn him another five playoff points that could make the difference in advancing to the championship round at Homestead-Miami Speedway. He knew he had won this race last year even after he lost a lap when a tire unraveled.
"We knew that this week was a big one," Truex said. "We wanted to come here and just run like we knew we could, not do anything out of the ordinary [and] most importantly not let the pressure dictate how we raced or what we did.
"I think we did that."
This Furniture Row Racing team just oozes confidence and has the speed, not even bothering to join many of its competitors for a test at Chicagoland Speedway this summer to prepare for the race.
"We definitely haven't had the cleanest days when it comes to Chicago, but we have a good understanding of what we need to do to be good here," crew chief Cole Pearn said. "We really had to work for it this weekend. We were pretty far off when we unloaded off the truck. We swung a lot more than we normally would."
Pearn said he did see Truex carry some frustration from the past two weeks into this weekend.
"After last week he was like, 'I want to go to Chicago and lap the field twice,'" Pearn said. "I think he was pretty motivated this whole weekend. Even when we were struggling in practice, he kept an upbeat attitude, kept everybody calm and focused, which shows more of his leadership skills.
"Coming off last week, [he was] definitely motivated. I think he showed that in how he drove."
Truex proved his team didn't need to test to know what it needed on a worn, 1.5-mile, semi-banked tri-oval. The driver who had led 22 percent of all laps this year went out and led 77 of the final 78 laps for the win.
His only real competition likely would have come from Kyle Busch, who led 85 of the first 87 laps. But having to pit under green for a loose wheel and then serve a penalty for the gas man going over the wall too soon (even though he wasn't gassing the car) cost Busch two laps and he never got back on the lead lap.
"I don't want to wish them ill will," Pearn said. "I was pretty happy we weren't racing them."
With Busch not a factor, the only thing that could beat Truex was a late caution and then either a poor pit stop or a poor restart.
Truex knows all about late cautions ruining a potential victory. Just last week at Richmond, he was leading when a caution for a car scraping the wall with less than three laps remaining resulted in his losing the race as his car wasn't the best short-run vehicle.
Before his success the past few years at Furniture Row Racing, Truex would have lamented the Richmond result and wondered in the last 25 laps at Chicagoland just when the caution would come out.
He said he didn't see anything that should cause a caution -- "There was absolutely nothing; there wasn't even like a hot dog wrapper or anything," he said.
And, frankly, he didn't let his mind go there on whether one would come out.
"Five years ago, I would have been, 'Please, please, no caution, please, no caution,'" Truex said. "Because I lost a bunch of them."
But now ...
"You never want to say, 'Geez, what the heck is going to happen now?'" Truex said. "You always try to be positive. But you're kind of thinking in the back of your mind, 'What are we going to do if it does come out? Are we going to be prepared?'
"Actually, today I really wasn't worried because I knew our car was fast on the short run and our pit crew, the last time we stopped, had a really good stop, so they had that confidence as well. I wasn't nervous about it at all."
The opening race did little to jumble the playoff field. Chase Elliott finished second, followed by Kevin Harvick, Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson and Brad Keselowski. After non-playoff driver Joey Logano, Jimmie Johnson was eighth, Matt Kenseth ninth, Jamie McMurray 10th and Ryan Blaney 11th.
"I didn't have anything for Martin," Elliott said. "I thought we made the most of our day -- without some luck I wasn't going to get around him unless we had a late-race restart or something."
Just 20 points separate ninth from 16th in the standings with two races left before four winless-in-the-round drivers are eliminated. No one can look at the standings and see he's out.
Truex can look and see he has advanced with the win. A year ago, he followed up that win with a victory two weeks later at Dover for two victories in the round.
There's no reason he can't do repeat that, building on what already is a Furniture Row Racing record five-win season. As far as the championship, though, he might not want to hear that no driver has won Chicagoland and then won the title in the three years of the elimination format.
Then again, he didn't come to Chicagoland to hammer home the idea of him as the championship favorite.
"As far as making a statement, I don't think we really came here to do that," Truex said. "I think we just came here to race, try to race to the best of our abilities, and at the end of the day accomplish what we feel like we're capable of.
"That's what we did."