2024 Pocono Rapid Race Report

The 2024 Pocono rapid race report includes a problematic pit road, an aggressive pit call and an unusual amount of carnage. Here are my after-race thoughts direct from Pocono.

Pit Road: Penalties and Quick Decisions

During pace laps, the cars travel down pit road to test out their calculations for pit road speed. Every pit road is divided into sections. I believe Pocono has 16 sections along the length of pit road.

After the cars had all gone down pit road, No. 11 crew chief Chris Gabehart noted that all but four of the 37 cars were over the speed limit in section 7. When one or two cars are over, you figure someone messed up a calculation, or there’s something odd going on with the meters in the car.

But when 91.9% of the field is over, that raises some questions about there being something more universally wrong. A NASCAR rep tells me that the moment they realized there was an anomaly, they double checked the system’s calibration. They found nothing different from the system responses measured the rest of the weekend.

Of course, it shouldn’t have mattered because everyone who was over knew that they were over and knew exactly where they were over. Every crew chief should have told their drivers how much to adjust so as not to speed.

The lack of cautions in the first two stages gave teams a lot of room to deploy different strategies. One of the most important pit stops came at during the caution starting at lap 116.

The No. 5 car came off pit road first, followed by the No. 12 and the No. 9. The first seven cars off pit road all took two tires giving them a jump on the rest of the field.

NASCAR race control then announced that the 5 and 9 (along with the 24 and the 99) were all too fast on pit road. Want to guess where?

Section 7.

That sent the 5 and the 9 to the back of the field, leaving the 12 to lead the remaining laps of the race. The gutsy call by No. 12 crew chief Jonathan Hassler to go with two tires combined with Ryan Blaney not speeding, turned the race’s tide toward the Penske No. 12.

I asked Hassler after the race about the speed limit issue. They were indeed one of the cars that was too fast during the Pit Road speed check; however… the No. 12 car’s pit box was inside Section 7. Because NASCAR measures average speed, it’s virtually impossible to speed in the section in which you pit.

If the No. 5 and the No. 9 hadn’t gotten caught speeding, we might have had a very different race.

Accidents

In the last 12 races at Pocono, the DNF rate was 10.7%. Thirteen out of 37 cars (35.1%) failed to finish this race. That number included

• 9 crashes
• 1 engine
• 1 suspension
• 1 fuel pump
• 1 overheating

Pocono can be really hard on cars because it requires sustained periods of maximum engine rpm and heavy braking. But this was an awful lot of crashes. Unfortunately, I think Kyle Busch sort of summed up the larger-than-usual number of cars taken out by accidents.

That’s just racing these days. It’s what happens.

Kyle Busch