Truex brothers on display this weekend at Loudon

LOUDON, N.H. -- Life couldn't have been much better Saturday afternoon at New Hampshire Motor Speedway for local favorite Martin Truex Jr., whose No. 1 Chevrolet was fastest in final practice for Sunday's Sprint Cup Lenox Industrial Tools 301.

"The car was a lot better [Saturday], we worked really hard on it [Friday] and made a lot of changes and got a lot better, but we knew we could improve on it," Truex said. "We just kept working on it and it's still not perfect by any means, it's still not where I want it to be but it's a whole lot better and we're gaining on it. It's real fast but a little too tight and if we can get that out of there we can have a great day."

• East: News, Results, Schedule

But as good as Truex's prospects are for Sunday, where he's riding a string of four consecutive top-seven finishes in Cup races at a track where he has three career victories; he's probably triply-excited at the performance his little brother, 17-year-old Ryan Truex, put in over the two previous days.

At a track that's special to the Truex family, since father Martin Truex also won in what's now the Camping World East Series, Ryan Truex won the pole for Friday's Heluva Good 125 and finished second after a fender-banging race to the finish with winner Matt DiBenedetto.

It unofficially put the younger Truex, who has a win and three top-five finishes in six starts as a Michael Waltrip Racing development driver, third in series points, 29 points behind leader Jody Lavender.

And it had his proud older brother, who turns 29 on Monday and who in the Northeast is affectionately known as "Little Martin" in deference to their noted racing father, smiling Saturday afternoon.

"I'm telling you, that's almost how it is -- boom, and here he is, and I'm so proud of him -- I'm like a little kid up on top of the trailer and I get so nervous," Truex said of his brother's appearance on a lot of racing people's radar screens. "He ain't really run nothing that's gotten a lot of attention. He's run in Legends cars and he ran my late model last year that I got for him to get some experience in. (Continued)