What started out as race recaps have become a must-read blog by Tommy Joe Martins.
Driver of the Martins Motorsports No. 44 Chevrolet in the Camping World Truck Series, Martins posted an entry June 17 after the Texas race that took off on social media. Titled Relevance, Martins revealed his mindset each weekend and how hard the sport is for an underfunded team.
Reaction to his blog has been mostly positive. Fans on social media have expressed an interest in reading, and Martins hopes he’s giving them what they want. Some drivers have expressed their support.
“Especially from guys kind of in the same situation as me, or maybe who are driving for smaller underfunded teams,” Martins told NBC Sports. “Maybe I’m equipped to kind of speak for us as a group in that sense because I’ve kind of been a knockaround guy out here for a little while now. I’ve never really driven for a team that had the capability of running up front.
“So guys like me or Ryan Ellis, or a few of those other guys in the back, maybe I’m equipped a little better to tell those stories. I think it’s resonated with a lot of the mechanics and drivers in my same situation.”
The idea behind the entries was born from a disdain for press releases.
“I think press releases are the most useless, terrible writing in the history of the world, and that’s what all the teams are doing, especially the big ones,” Martins said. “That’s no fault of the PR person; there’s just a format to it. They write about, ‘Well, this is what happened,’ and ‘On Lap 72, we changed tires,’ and there just wasn’t much to it, and every one of them seems like it’s the exact same thing.
“You have a quote from the driver that’s probably made up, or they probably didn’t say it, and writing the thing in third person is just not very good to me. It’s not very entertaining.”
With a degree in journalism from Ole Miss, Martins always has enjoyed writing. Blogging has been an easy venture, though Martins has an extra set of eyes look over each article.
“I’ve got an editor that’s a friend of mine from college named Alex McDaniel, and she works for Gridiron Now, and she’s done a lot of stuff with Parade magazine,” Martins said. “I have her look over the article before I post it, and I basically write whatever I want to write.”
There are some things Martins will not get into.
Well-spoken and passionate about the sport, as well as his place in it, do not expect Martins to take any shots at NASCAR. There are areas he would like to see changed, and he would like to see NASCAR handle some things differently, but as a competitor, Martins will play it smart.
“Quite frankly, we’re poor, and we can’t really afford for me to get fined, so I can’t do some things that maybe I’d like to do,” he said. “But those are minor things. For the most part has it been tough? No, it really hasn’t been. It hasn’t been difficult. The first blog was the easiest one just because I think it flowed. I wrote that whole article in 30 minutes, and that was a pretty long one.”
But there have been those he unintentionally rubbed the wrong way.
“That first article I talked about a really kind of taboo thing, the money involved in the sport, and I think that’s something that people don’t really like to talk about, which I don’t really know why,” Martins said. “I think it’s pretty obvious nobody poor is going to make it in this sport anymore. We don’t really have to dance around that, and I called some people out because I feel like they generally tried to make themselves out a lot [poorer] than they really are.”
Jordan Anderson was one driver who took offense, leading to a conversation between the two.
“He said, ‘Hey man, I don’t know if I like you anymore because you wrote that article and said basically we’re spending more money than you and we’re not spending much money at all,’ ” Martins said. “Jordan is a nice guy, and I love Jordan. Basically, I’m racing with him every week we’re side by side a lot, so I’m not trying to rub anybody the wrong way. I just said what I thought was the truth and how I perceived everything, and especially how the guys in the garage perceived it. So I wasn’t trying to rub anybody the wrong way.”
With the fun he’s been having, Martins has no plans to stop his blog.
