Pocono win as big for the team as it is for Chris Buescher
As races go, they don’t get any weirder than Monday’s Pennsylvania 400 at Pocono Raceway.
Or if you’re Chris Buescher, his crew chief Bob Osborne and team general manager Jerry Freeze, they don’t get any more joyous.
Buescher, a 23-year-old rookie from Texas who drives for the small, unheralded Front Row Motorsports team, scored the biggest upset in NASCAR this year when he stayed out under caution to win the bizarre, rain-delayed and fog-shortened Monday afternoon race.
It was just the second victory for the team, the last one coming in a stunning 1-2 finish with David Ragan leading David Gilliland to the checkered flag at Talladega in May 2013.
Buescher’s run broke a 118-race winless streak for the small, Bob Jenkins-owned team.
Osborne made the call for Buescher to stay our under caution, which gave him the lead, but the driver and team had to wait for what seemed forever on pit road before NASCAR officially cut the race off at 138 of the scheduled 160 laps.
“We're sitting there on pit road,” said Buescher. “I'm just being a little bit selfish, but doing a rain dance, hoping the fog doesn't roll out, just watching Turn 1, and every now and then I'd see the billboard down there, and just as soon as we would, it would disappear again. We were joking down there, everybody is asking, ‘What Turn 1?’ because we couldn't see that one, either.”
Buescher has had a tough rookie season, suffering through three superspeedway crashes and sitting just 31st in points, but even before the Pocono victory, he saw progress.
“We had pretty steep odds coming into this one, but we've been heading in the right direction, and there's no mistaking that,” he said. “We've been qualifying better. We've been racing better. We've had better speed, better averages. We're just getting to the point now where we need to be able to finish them.
“Today I think everybody knows it's not just a pure run to the end and all-out speed,” said Buescher. “There was a lot of other things going on today. But you take advantage of every situation that's presented to you, and that's what we did today.”
For a driver, winning is huge.
But for a team, it can be the lifeblood that brings in sponsor money and allows the team to survive.
“Obviously it puts us in a different place, and when you can say and put in your literature that you're a Sprint Cup Series winning team, it certainly gives you a little more clout than otherwise,” said Freeze, the team general manager.
“We saw a bump when we won the race at Talladega a few years ago,” Freeze said. “It happened to be the very first race that Love's Travel Stops was on our car, and they took a two-race program that's now a 20-race program with us, and it evolved over that over the last three or four years. CSX is our other big partner around the 34 program, and they've grown over the years with us… This hopefully will be a catalyst to have a few more that want to come on board and help support our program.”
Of course, it doesn’t mean the team can rest on its laurels. Far from it, in fact.
Asked how he would celebrate his big win, Buescher said, “By getting on a plane and going to Utah. We've got a road course school that we're trying to figure out how to be better at Watkins Glen now, so there's no time to celebrate, unfortunately.”
Chris Buescher, driver of the No. 34 Dockside Logistics Ford, celebrates in Victory Lane after winning the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Pennsylvania 400 at Pocono Raceway on Aug. 1, 2016 in Long Pond, Pennsylvania.
Front Row Motorsports
