Dover week: Truex inspired by girlfriend's cancer fight

For 10 years, Martin Truex Jr. and Sherry Pollex have started almost every race the same way.

Just before the national anthem, Truex, who will race in Sunday's NASCAR event at Dover Speedway, stands with his No. 78 car on one side and Pollex on the other. He holds his girlfriend's hand. They pray during the song. When it's over, they hug and tell each other "I love you" before he climbs into the cockpit.

"You don't stand by your car without your loved one before you get into a race car and start going 200 miles per hour," Pollex said. ". . . and I think when I wasn't there to do that with him, it was probably a pretty lonely feeling."

In August, right before Truex was set to race in Michigan, Pollex was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and went into surgery less than a week later. What doctors had been calling ovarian cysts for three months shocked Pollex and Truex, who, at the same time, was struggling to find team chemistry in his first season with Furniture Row Racing.

But Pollex - who is now in remission, doing monthly maintenance chemotherapy and back at the racetrack every weekend - has inspired a change in Truex. A new outlook on life has helped him unite a once-disconnected team, climb to second in NASCAR's Sprint Cup standings, and gain steam heading into the Sunday's FedEx 400 Benefiting Autism Speaks.

Truex was the second-faster qualifier for Sunday's race, posting a time of 159.723 m.p.h. on Friday.

"She's always motivating me," said Truex, a Mayetta, N.J., native. "I think that she and what she's been through has definitely helped me focus on the things that matter and not about the things that don't."

Truex fell in love with the sport at short-track Wall Stadium Speedway in Wall Township, N.J., where he went as a toddler to watch his father race. As he got older, racing became all he'd think about during the week and he'd rush to Wall Stadium when school let out on Fridays.

When he met Pollex through a friend, she immediately became an integral part of his NASCAR career. They moved in together after six months, she helped start his charity benefiting pediatric cancer, and still ran her own store near their home in Mooresville, N.C.

And she traveled with him full-time from the start, taking the bus to each track, spending time with him before each race and embracing him after each finish.

But in the last two years, Pollex saw Truex not enjoying racing like he used to. His car wasn't running well and neither was his team, and he would get angry at little things. Then she was diagnosed and he considered taking the rest of the season off to take care of her.

Instead, he stayed on the track and critics blamed Truex's spotty driving on Pollex being sick. Truex and Pollex saw it have the opposite effect.

"I think Martin's perspective on life and racing, just everything about him changed," Pollex said. "I hate to say that me getting cancer did that because no one wants to have something horrible happen to their loved ones to turn their life around, but in Martin's case that's really what happened."

Truex's only top-five finish of the season came in Kansas on Oct. 5, and he finished in the top 20 in his last three races of 2014. At that time, Pollex was often home with her mother, losing her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, and experiencing difficult side effects from a rare intraperitoneal chemotherapy treatment.

In December, Truex promoted Cole Pearn from lead engineer to crew chief and the two gelled right away. Pollex finished her chemotherapy in January and Truex and Pollex traveled to the Daytona 500 on Feb. 22.

At Daytona, Pollex remembers being tired and feeling weak because of all the weight she had lost. Yet she could feel things shifting back to normal. Truex finished eighth and has only finished out of the top 10 once since.

"It had the potential to be the lowest low of their lives," said Ryan Newman, who drives the No. 31 car and is one of Truex's best friends in NASCAR. "But then it turned out to be the biggest rebound of his career, and I couldn't be happier for him and Sherry."

This weekend, Truex will vie for his first race win of the season at one of his favorite tracks. Dover is where he won his first Sprint Cup Series race in 2007, and he's been trying to duplicate that weekend ever since.

Before she was diagnosed, Pollex thinks Truex may have, once in a while, taken her being at the track for granted.

But that never happens now, and Truex made sure to show that he wants her next to him at Dover this weekend. They'll hold hands during the national anthem, hug right after it, and then she'll watch from the stands as a refueled driver whirls around the track.

"We pretty much do everything together so when she's not at the track with me it feels weird," Truex said. "I told her the other day, 'You better come this weekend because I think I'm going to win and I want you there to see it.' "