NASCAR: Truex Jr. accepts blame for mega crash

Martin Truex Jr. was in the same car that dominated the Coca-Cola 600 back in May, but didn't enjoy the same results in his return to Charlotte Motor Speedway on Sunday in the Bank of America 500.

Instead, the presumptive championship favorite had to battle just to finish 13th while also finding himself in the center of controversy. He triggered a 12-car crash involving several playoff contenders, including Austin Dillon and Chase Elliott. The incident began on a Lap 260 restart when Truex ran into the back of Dillon.

From there, cars scattered and collided into each other, leaving Truex to take responsibility.

"I flat ran Austin over," Truex said. "He got going pretty good, started spinning his tires a little, and I tried to give him a shove to get him going, thinking I was going to help him out, and I guess hit him way too hard. I thought I was square, and we were going to be good, and I was just going to help him out. As soon as I hit him, just turned him around, so completely my fault.

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"I feel awful for him and [crew chief] Slugger [Labbe] and all those guys and all the other guys I tore up behind him. I just misjudged it trying to help. Just a stupid move, I guess."

This is also the same car that Truex took to Victory Lane three weeks ago at Chicagoland Speedway. He simply expected more.

"We just missed it," Truex said. "We had good speed; we just needed clean air to be able to do it because we were on a splitter so bad. I don't know, we just missed our travels for some reason and were just plowing the hell out of the ground all day long. We made a few packer adjustments to try and get it off the ground. We just never did go far enough.

"Even with that said, we still had a second-, third-, fourth-place car towards the end of the race, which for as bad as we were is saying something because it wasn't very good. We just missed it. Kind of banking off what we did here in the first race and just didn't get enough practice to work out those little details."

Despite the adversity, Truex still ran inside the top 10 for much of the afternoon. But a clutch failure stalled his exit from pit road after his final stop. He came in fourth and left outside the top 10.

"Just freak deal with the clutch going out," Truex said. "I'm not sure what happened there; clutch engaged itself and stalled the engine then we just sitting there dead. So luckily it started in gear. I was worried it wasn't going to start at all, so luckily it started and we got back going."

Truex left Charlotte seventh on the Chase Grid and is 19 points ahead of the cutoff.