Extra pit-road timing lines at Las Vegas present challenges (again) for drivers
LAS VEGAS -- After a spate of speeding penalties in last Sunday’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Atlanta, the last thing any driver wants to see in this Sunday’s Kobalt 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway is a red light on his dashboard as he comes down pit road.
But they all know that, like at Atlanta, NASCAR has installed extra timing lines at Vegas to monitor pit-road speeds. Each driver has his maximum pit-road speed set so that red warning lights on his digital dashboard will alert him in the cockpit if he’s going too fast.
"This weekend will be brutal because we’ve never had these timing lines before at Vegas, and Vegas already is notoriously difficult on speeders," said Kurt Busch, winner of the season-opening Daytona 500.
With Las Vegas being such track that already has that reputation for catching lots of speeders on pit road in the past, drivers know they have another challenge on their hands to avoid costly penalties. The risk vs. reward of trying to “game the system” and gain a small advantage by getting everything you can on pit road just might not be worth it.
“We knew they added segments (at Atlanta). It's just that you go through the segments pretty fast,” Matt Kenseth, who was caught speeding twice in his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota at AMS, said Friday at the Las Vegas track. “When they're twice as long, even if you're not trying to cheat a segment or do something like that, if you look away for a second at your pit stall or whatever and you get going a little bit, you've got some room to slow down and correct because they're timed segments.”
That wasn’t the case last Sunday at Atlanta.
“You went through them last weekend so fast that if you ever did get one light over or whatever, there was no time to correct,” Kenseth said.
He also said it was his team’s own fault.
“For us, we just had the stuff set too aggressively,” he added. “I think especially after they change something at a track, you've just got to kind of start over and get a good baseline and err to the slow side and then go from there for the next race."
Kurt Busch agrees, especially after watching a late speeding penalty cost fellow Ford driver Kevin Harvick the win last Sunday at Atlanta.
“Last week was the first time we had been to Atlanta with the shorter timing zones," said Busch, driver of the No. 41 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford. "Pit-road timing zones used to be 300 feet apart. Now they’re 150 feet apart. And so when you’re traveling at 45 miles per hour, 150 feet goes by pretty quick – and you have no time to get back any extra speed that you may plan to carry through that segment.
“So I have my lights set up to where if they just flicker red, I should be OK. But now you’re thinking, ‘Oh, no. I don’t need to have any red anymore because the segments are so close.
Not everyone is as concerned about the additional timing lines at Vegas as Kenseth, Kurt Busch and others.
“I’m not concerned about them,” said Chris Buescher, who drives the No. 37 Chevrolet for JTG Daugherty Racing. “It leaves a lot less room to try and cheat the larger segments or larger gaps that we had before the added lines. I never really fully took advantage of that. I was just trying to make sure I wasn’t speeding at all.
“So now that they have added more lines, it hasn’t changed much for me. But I know for a lot of drivers that were really maxing out their pit-road speeds and able to get that little jump of speed before getting to their box or leaving, they’ve had to throttle back a little bit.”
Buescher said he was warned early on by his crew chief, Trent Owens, and spotter David Keith to watch his speed carefully on pit road at Atlanta. He said they don’t even have to remind him at Vegas, another 1.5-mile track with a reputation for pit-road speeding violations even before they added the new timing lines this year.
“The Atlanta thing, Trent and D.K., they told me very early on,” he said. “Before we ever made a stop, they said, ‘You need to be careful. They’ve already busted four or five guys for speeding and they have been on it.’
“So we kind of just backed off one light on our dash and made sure that we didn’t get caught speeding.”
Buescher knows that one pit-road speeding penalty can throw away an entire day’s good work of staying out of trouble and passing cars on the track.
“For me, the way I look at it, one speeding penalty will take away any progress that any 49.5 miles per hour versus 49 mph on pit road will have gained you throughout a race,” he said. “Yeah, you’ve got to try to max it out. But for me, I’ve got to look at the bigger picture and make sure that we don’t have a speeding penalty. I think that’s for me and what I try and do there. So I’m not worried about the extra lines here.”
Defending Las Vegas race winner Brad Keselowski, who also won at Atlanta, perhaps put it in the best perspective.
“As far as all the speeding penalties last week, yeah, it’s going to continue to play out as a storyline,” Keselowski said. “But I think it’s one of those things where everybody kind of learns the new boundaries and settles in, and then it kind of goes away.”
