NASCAR has increased the number of timing zones on pit road this weekend at Pocono Raceway.
Last week, NASCAR had 12 timing zones at Indianapolis Motor Speedway — an average of one timing zone about every three pit stalls. Four drivers were penalized for speeding at Indy: Jimmie Johnson, Denny Hamlin, Tony Stewart and Jamie McMurray.
This weekend, NASCAR will have 18 timing zones at Pocono — an average of one timing zone about every two pit stalls.
NASCAR increased the number of timing zones after questions were raised when Martin Truex Jr. was penalized earlier this month at Kentucky for passing leader Kevin Harvick on the left. Truex accelerated after crossing the last timing line before his pit stall and passed Harvick. To prevent similar occurrences, NASCAR added timing zones at New Hampshire Motor Speedway as an experiment and put all the additional timing zones in play for the first time last weekend at Indianapolis.
Here is the pit road chart at Pocono with all the timing zones:
Here is what Aric Almirola said about the additional timing zones:
“It forces us to be a lot more mindful of our tach. You have to realize and something I think a lot of people don’t understand and don’t realize is that our dash is mounted low in the race cars, so when we’re going down pit road we have to look down at our dash to make sure that we’re keeping our pit road speed at an optimal speed.
“We want to go fast enough to make time on pit road. You don’t want to go too slow because then you give up time to your competitors, and if you go just 100 RPM too fast, you’re speeding and then you get a penalty. So we’re really focused and concentrating on looking down at our dash and not really looking up at all until our spotters and crew chiefs tell us we’re five (pit stalls) away or 10 away, and then you kind of look up but at the same time make sure you’re maintaining a pit road speed.
“Before, with the timing lines being so far apart, you kind of had some leeway to where if you are supposed to be running one red light and you happen to flash two or three red lights, which would be speeding, you had an opportunity to kind of slow back down and slow back down to a few green lights and get the time between those segments back to where you wouldn’t be speeding. Now, with the timing lines closer together, if you just get a little bit greedy or you look up to see where your pit stall is at and you creep up your RPMs a little bit, you’re going to get a speeding penalty.
“I’ve long been a proponent for some sort of mechanism that we can have in the car that just causes us to go pit road speed. If they’re that worried about us getting an advantage between timing lines and things like that, why don’t they just make us all go pit road speed like every other form of racing has. I think it would be safer. I think it would give us the opportunity to actually look out of our windshields because, like I said, every driver coming down pit road – that’s why you see it a lot, if somebody checks up to get in their pit box you, you see cars stack up on pit road. We all are looking down at our dash. It’s like texting and driving.
“While we’re looking down, out of our peripheral vision we kind of have an idea of what’s going on, but you’re not as focused as what’s going on outside the windshield as you are at your dash.”
