Bob Pockrass
FOX Motorsports Insider
Christopher Bell and Adam Stevens showed poise last Sunday at Las Vegas when Bell left pit road with no lugnut on his front left and Stevens instructed him to find a pit box of a teammate to tighten it.
Bell darted by other cars on pit road when he saw that teammate Chase Briscoe’s pit wasn’t occupied. He drove in and one of Briscoe’s crew members secured a lugnut on the front left.
He was penalized for pitting outside his pit box and sent to the rear of the field for the restart, which would be the same penalty he would have had if the wheel came off on pit road.
But if the wheel came off once Bell left pit road, he would have been given a two-lap penalty and he would have lost the tire changer and the jackman for the next two races.
The move was within the rules. Joe Gibbs Racing and Toyota had asked NASCAR officials about the move, and it was apparently in their playbook for more than a year.
But everything has to work for the move to occur.
A driver must be pitting far enough up pit road that the driver on the way down pit road can find a box of a team willing to tighten the lugnut. That would most likely be a teammate, although many teams lease a crew from a bigger organization, so those possibly could be options.
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The applicable rules state:
— A driver must pit in the driver’s assigned pit box (the penalty for not doing so is tail end of the longest line under yellow, a drive through under green).
— A driver can’t impede another team’s pit (so a driver can’t drive in a box of a team that is getting ready to pit its own car).
— A team in an adjacent pit box can’t purposely help another team. This rule is in place so teams don’t work together when rolling tires to use each other’s pit crews for help.
— Under extenuating circumstances, a team can use another organization’s roster members (this would be seen as an extenuating safety circumstance).
If a car hits a loose tire, it could launch over fences or walls. Therefore, this seems like a good policy because a tire coming off could be a major safety issue. Or at the very least, there needs to be a policy to encourage drivers to get this fixed on pit road.
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NASCAR might need to add a rule that says this can only be done for safety reasons. If a car has damage from contact on pit road or needs fuel because the tank didn’t get full (or if you see more people taking four tires and you only took two), a driver can’t opt to pit in another stall for service.
Should NASCAR penalize the driver more? A lap? Two laps? The driver would still come in to avoid suspension for crew members, but the driver still left the pit stall with the loose wheel and deserves a significant penalty.
Or should NASCAR have an area beyond pit road at tracks where a driver can come in and get a lugnut tightened? That seems like a possible option but one that would come with inherent headaches regarding whether they get the lugnut tight and how fast they do it, among other issues.
Is it fair to compare a single-car team to a four-car team? It’s not — especially now that the four-car teams are grandfathered into the new three-charter limit (a three-charter team can have a fourth car as an open). But there are many advantages to having a big team, and this doesn’t seem like it would tip the balance of competition.
This is one of those times, though, where NASCAR should wait and see how this plays out. They should wait to see if teams try to take advantage of this policy designed for safety reasons and whether they need to be reigned in for competition purposes.
After all, at least some teams have had this planned in case they needed it since last season, and this is the first time that they had the opportunity to execute it. Let’s first see if this is a relatively common occurrence.
NASCAR certainly should monitor it and research alternatives, but the time to act has not come. Yet.
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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