NASCAR Cup Series

Can Joe Gibbs Racing score Pocono redemption?

Published Nov. 15, 2016 3:23 p.m. ET

Larry McReynolds

I’m excited for our return to Pocono this weekend as we begin to go around the horn visiting the tracks the for the second time of the season.

If you go back a few weeks into June, we saw Kurt Busch come home the winner of the first race at Pocono, and he did it in pretty dominating fashion by leading 32 laps.

Behind him, the No. 88 finished second with Dale Earnhardt Jr. As you all know, Dale Jr. is forced to sit out again this weekend for health reasons, so Jeff Gordon is behind the wheel.

Jeff knocked the rust off last Sunday at Indy and now has a race under his belt with this new aero package. Seeing that he has the most wins of any driver at Pocono with six, I expect that to be a pretty powerful combination come Sunday.

I’m also going to be keeping my eye on the Joe Gibbs Racing teams. Back in June at Pocono, they really were a non-factor with the highest finishing Gibbs driver only able to make it to seventh place by the end of the day. Now some six weeks later, and on the heels of a dominating win by Kyle Busch at the Brickyard 400, does that mean JGR will perform better the second time around at Pocono?

Obviously there is no guarantee that the way the June race goes is a reflection of how Sunday will go.

One major difference is that the track will have changed since June as it has sat there baking in this heat wave we’ve all been experiencing.

So my biggest question is, based on how they performed at the Brickyard 400, will the Gibbs Toyotas be able to perform like that again this Sunday, contrary to how they performed at Pocono back in June?