The Pocono 400 saw many changes this time around. The track was repaved, leading to track qualifying records; The race is shorter (Thank god!) and apparently there was an issue with speeding during the race. Oops.
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First up, congrats to Joey Logano for winning the Pocono 400! For a moment I thought Mark Martin had the race in hand, but the double-nickel car could not quite hold off Logano in the closing laps and that was all she wrote!
Logano won, Mark Martin came in 2nd, Tony Stewart: 3rd; Jimmie Johnson: 4th and Denny Hamlin rounded out the top-5 finishers.
The new points leader, Matt Kenseth finished 7th; Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished 8th; Greg Biffle: 24th; Kevin Harvick: 14th; Martin Truex Jr finished 20th.
Ryan Newman ended the day in 12th.
Top 35 Bubble
If my estimations are correct, or close to it, the No. 10 car (Tommy Baldwin), driven by Dave Blaney, finished 25th, and moved the team out of 34th and into 32nd in the Owner Points and the No. 36 car (Allan Heinke) that was driven by Tony Raines, is now sitting in the cat bird seat, in 35th.
As nerve wracking as that sounds, right now, it's not. They will be 55 points in front of the 36th place car, the No. 33 (Richard Childress) that was driven by Stephen Leicht, but who had brake problems Sunday.
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Pocono's New Track Surface
I think that the new track surface made the racing marginally more entertaining to watch. But overall, it felt and looked like the same place, where cars would dive in low and fast and slide up into their fellow competitors and what not.
The new track surface made speeds faster and with faster speeds, made the hits harder. Kasey Kahne, AJ Allmendinger, and others all met the wall doing faster speeds. AJ said it was the hardest hit he's ever taken when he graced the wall with the paint from his No. 22 car.
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Speeding Loops Were Not Broken!
The big news of the day was speeding down on pit road. Wow. Twenty-two different speeding penalties were handed out Sunday and twenty of them were for exiting pit road. The big attention getter was when Jimmie Johnson was serving his first penalty with a drive-through when he got nabbed again for exiting pit road too fast.
Of those "speeding tickets" given out, Travis Kvapil was nailed four times; David Reutimann: three times (one was for entering pit road too fast); & Johnson, Brad Keselowski, & AJ Allmendinger were each nabbed twice.
The fans and media were all on fire, lobbing blame on something being wrong with the system itself and were calling for NASCAR to red flag the race and fix the issue. (The Twitter lot are pretty quick to lob fault. They seem faster at lobbing fault than online Wall Street trader hobbyists!) I had chimed in, but if you follow me on Twitter, I was being glib, or humorous about it.
The TNT broadcast team (a refreshing change, who took over from Fox) went to work and found out that one of the timing loops at the end of pit road had been moved when the track was repaved and reconfigured. Last year, the last timing loop/segment on pit road was 56 feet long and yesterday, it was 83 feet long.
So nothing was wrong, it was just different. And no one from any of the race teams took note of this, if that was something that was to be able to be taken note of.
I guess next time a track is newly reconfigured, teams will be keeping an eye on these things
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