BROOKLYN, Mich. –Can 14 drivers all be wrong?
Roughly a third of the field in last Sunday’s Pocono 400 presented by #NASCAR was busted for speeding on pit road. Several drivers, including Johnson, received multiple penalties. Among them, the offending drivers collected 22 speeding penalties, eight more than the previous record of 14 doled out at Kansas in 2006.
Four days removed from the infractions that cost him a chance to win the race, Johnson still believes there was a problem with the last set of timing lines on pit road.
“Myself and 13 other drivers certainly think there was something wrong with that last loop,” Johnson said Thursday at Michigan. “There are a few components to it. NASCAR measures pit road different from the way the cars are able to. We do it off a mathematical equation that spits out RPM. They do it on an elapsed time between loops.
“It’s tough to really blend those two worlds together and know what’s what, unless there is maybe a GPS readout of a car going down pit road and what those speeds are. We don’t have that. Long story short, there are questions, and there will be debate until we’re able to all see it live at that moment.”
Pemberton said NASCAR was satisfied with the way the system worked at Pocono but would take another look before the Sprint Cup Series returns to Pocono in August.
“We’ll go back and we’ll look at the equipment and things,” Pemberton said. “All of our inputs were correct. The dimensions (of the pit road segments in which cars are clocked) were correct. We go out of our way to not penalize — contrary to popular belief. We’ll go back and make sure if, for some strange reason, something went wrong, but we haven’t seen that.
“We looked at it all with all our backup systems during the event. We never saw any of that. But we’ll go back, just like they (the teams) did, because we want to make sure that everybody’s OK.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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