DARLINGTON, S.C. (AP) — Martin Truex Jr. qualified for the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs after some nervous moments when he crashed out on the third lap of the Southern 500 on Sunday.
Truex slid up into defending champion Ryan Blaney and both cars went to the garage. But after two stages (230 laps) at Darlington Raceway, NASCAR announced that Truex, the 2017 series champ, was locked into the 16-driver field.
Truex is in his last full season as a driver for Joe Gibbs Racing. He started the race 58 points ahead of the cutoff line to reach the playoffs, which start next week at Atlanta, and he said Saturday he felt good about his position at 14th on the playoff grid entering the weekend.
The wreck left Truex watching the race unfold and hoping others behind him wouldn't do enough on the track to knock him out.
“It was all my fault, all my doing,” Truex said outside the infield care center.
Truex said he had a run on William Byron's No. 24 when the car got away from him.
“I thought everything was going fine and I ran into him. Obviously, that was on me,” he said.
Blaney, like Truex, was taken to the care center. The Team Penske driver said he was hurting at first, but felt like he'd be OK going forward as he prepares to defend his series title beginning next week in Atlanta.
“I saw Martin get loose, and I thought he was going to spin to the bottom, so I kind of gassed up to get around him, but it was just terrible timing,” Blaney said. “He overcorrected, and we were just right there.”
Truex's JGR teammate Ty Gibbs entered without a win in 15th, while Chris Buescher of Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing was on the playoff bubble in 16th.
Bubba Wallace, who started from the pole, was the first man out of playoff position, 21 points behind Buescher when the race began.
Truex's wreck shuffled him out of playoff position temporarily. Despite getting in, he knows he'll need to turn things around to make a deep playoff run.
“It sucks. We just had a miserable two months,” he said. “Tonight was on me, sorry to my team and all the guys who work so hard.”
AP NASCAR: https://apnews.com/hub/nascar-racing
FILE - Kyle Busch (18) and Martin Truex Jr. (19) drive during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Michigan International Speedway, Monday, Aug. 19, 2024, in Brooklyn, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
Kyle Larson (5) leads Todd Gilliland (38), Joey Logano (22), Kyle Busch (8) and Ryan Blaney (12) through the front stretch during a NASCAR Cup Series auto race at Daytona International Speedway, Saturday, Aug. 24, 2024, in Daytona Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
NEW YORK (AP) — As she anticipates her estranged uncle's return to the White House, Mary Trump isn't expecting any future book to catch on like such first-term tell-alls as Michael Wolff's million-selling “Fire and Fury” or her own blockbuster, “Too Much and Never Enough.”
“What else is there to learn?” she says. “And for people who don't know, the books have been written. It's all really out in the open now.”
For publishers, Donald Trump's presidential years were a time of extraordinary sales in political books, helped in part by Trump's legal threats and angered tweets. According to Circana, which tracks around 85% of the hardcover and paperback market, the genre's sales nearly doubled from 2015 to 2020, from around 5 million copies to around 10 million.
Besides books by Wolff and Trump, other bestsellers included former FBI Director James Comey's “A Higher Loyalty,” former national security adviser John Bolton's “The Room Where it Happened” and Bob Woodward's “Fear.” Meanwhile, sales for dystopian fiction also jumped, led by Margaret Atwood's “A Handmaid's Tale,” which was adapted into an award-winning Hulu series.
But interest has dropped back to 2015 levels since Trump left office, according to Circana, and publishers doubt it will again peak so highly. Readers not only showed little interest in books by or about President Joe Biden and his family — they even seemed less excited about Trump-related releases. Mary Trump's “Who Could Ever Love You” and Woodward's “War” were both popular this fall, but neither has matched the sales of their books written during the first Trump administration.
“We’ve been there many times, with all those books,” HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham says of the various Trump tell-alls. He added that he still sees a market for at least some Trump books — perhaps analyzing the recent election — because “there's a general, serious smart audience, not politically aligned in a hard way,” one that would welcome “an intelligent voice.”
In the days following Trump's victory, “The Handmaid's Tale” and George Orwell's “1984” returned to bestseller lists, along with more contemporary works such as Timothy Snyder's “On Tyranny," a 2017 bestseller that expanded upon a Facebook post Snyder wrote soon after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Books appealing to pro-Trump readers also surged, including those written by Cabinet picks — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s “The Real Anthony Fauci” and Pete Hegseth's “The War on Warriors” — and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance's “Hillbilly Elegy,” his 2016 memoir that's sold hundreds of thousands of copies since Trump selected him as his running mate.
First lady Melania Trump's memoir, “Melania,” came out in October and has been high on Amazon.com bestseller lists for weeks, even as critics found it contained little newsworthy information. According to Circana, it has sold more than 200,000 copies, a figure that does not include books sold directly through her website.
“The Melania book has done extraordinarily well, better than we thought,” says Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt. “After Election Day, we sold everything we had of it.”
Conservative books have sold steadily over the years, and several publishers — most recently Hachette Book Group — have imprints dedicated to those readers. Publishers expect at least some critical books to reach bestseller lists — if only because of the tradition of the publishing market favoring the party out of power. But the nature of what those books would look like is uncertain. Perhaps a onetime insider will have a falling out with Trump and write a memoir, like Bolton or former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, or maybe some of his planned initiatives, whether mass deportation or the prosecution of his political foes, will lead to investigative works.
A new “Fire and Fury” is doubtful, with the originally only possible because Wolff enjoyed extraordinary access, spending months around Trump and his White House staff. Members of the president-elect's current team have already issued a statement saying they have refused to speak with Wolff, calling the author a “known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations, and conclusions that never happened.”
A publicist for Wolff said he was declining comment.
Woodward, who interviewed Trump at length for the 2020 bestseller “Rage,” told The Associated Press that he had written so much about Trump and other presidents that he wasn't sure what he'd take on next. He doesn't rule out another Trump book, but that will depend in part on the president-elect, how “out of control he gets,” Woodward said, and how far he is able to go.
“He wants to be the imperial president, where he gets to decide everything and no one's going to get in his way,” Woodward said. “He's run into some brick walls in the past and there may be more brick walls. I don't know what will happen. I'll be watching and doing some reporting, but I'm still undecided.”
1. “Too Much and Never Enough,” by Mary Trump: 1,248,212 copies
2. “Fire and Fury,” by Michael Wolff: 936,116 copies
3. “Fear,” by Bob Woodward: 872,014 copies
4. “The Room Where It Happened,” by John Bolton: 676,010 copies
5. “Rage,” by Bob Woodward: 549,685 copies
These figures represent total sales provided by Circana, which tracks about 85% of the print market and does not include e-book or audiobook sales.
FILE - A customer looks at a copy of Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" as they go on sale at a bookshop, in London, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)
FILE - Mary Trump discussing her book "Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir" at The 92nd Street Y on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Books are displayed under a sign at the Harvard Book Store, Thursday, March 9, 2017, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)
FILE - A customer looks at a copy of Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" as they go on sale at a bookshop, in London, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)
FILE - A collection of books about President Donald Trump, from left, "Siege" by Michael Wolff, "Devil's Bargain" by Joshua Green, "Where Law Ends" by Andrew Weissmann, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership" by James Comey, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff, "Rage" by Bob Woodward, "Too Much and Never Enough" by Mary L. Trump, "Disloyal" by Michael Cohen, "Donald Trump V. The United States" by Michael S. Schmidt, "Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World" by H. R. McMaster and "Wicked Game" by Rick Gates appear on a shelf in Westchester County, N.Y. on Monday, Nov. 9, 2020. (AP Photo, File)
