One thing that potentially changed the outcome of the race at Pocono in the Cup Series over the weekend was the late assessment of a speeding penalty for four drivers coming off pit road, including Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson.
Larson appeared to be coming out of pit road in first, while Elliott wasn’t far behind in third.
Instead, both were tagged with speeding penalties and forced to head to the back of the pack, essentially taking winning off the table in the late stages.
Worse, NASCAR may have a systemic issue at Pocono.
The sheer rarity of Elliott’s infraction, at the very least, should raise some eyebrows, Denny Hamlin pointed out.
“Chase Elliott hasn’t had one in 93 races or something like that; he didn’t make it to 93,” Hamlin said on the Actions Detrimental with Denny Hamlin podcast. “That was an unbelievable stat. You always seem to kind of get hit by one somewhere along the way. But he hasn’t. That was the first time.”
Hamlin did his best to break down why there was an issue with speeding at Pocono on Sunday.
“We did hear on the radio that Section 7 was hot for everyone when we did our pre-race roll,” Hamlin explained. “All the cars but I think four sped. So there was something weird about that, and if you look at Pocono’s … if we were to set our car on cruise control — best way to explain this — each section we’re able to go higher or lower than actual pit road speed. And what happens and the reasons that drivers speed most of the time is we’re trying to cheat that.
“We’re trying to figure out where is NASCAR registering a low speed, even though you know you’re going a certain RPM, which is a certain speed, sometimes it reads lower on their end. So what do you do? You try to get more, because you know you won’t be caught speeding.”
With so many teams speeding during the pre-race roll, drivers likely thought they had the edge figured out at Pocono. Only, once the race began, some of them actually got nabbed for speeding.
Hamlin thinks the inconsistency of pit road itself was part of the problem, leading drivers like Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson to hunt for that edge more than most other tracks.
“Pocono is one where they almost need to recalibrate it, because it has got more sections than I think any other pit road,” Hamlin said. “It’s like 18, like every two pit boxes is the markers for their timing lines.
“But they’re all up and down, like you could run the same exact speed, same RPM, put your car on cruise control, and it’s going to read, let’s just say the speed limit, let’s pretend it was 45 miles per hour. It would read 43.5 in one section, 43.7 in another, 44.1, 43.5. Like it’s just so up and down and it’s weird that that’s the case on a straight pit road.”
Whether Pocono will look at that remains to be seen. But what we know for now is it was an unfortunate turn of events for Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson on an otherwise competitive day.
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