NASCAR Cup Series

NASCAR teams face early pressure

Published Mar. 16, 2011 1:00 a.m. ET

Jeff Hammond

While we all know that when action at Bristol Motor Speedway is on the track, don’t forget to watch the action on pit road.

If you make a mistake this weekend at Bristol, like some of these guys did in Las Vegas two weeks ago, you will be four or five laps down in a blink of an eye. As strong as the competition is today, there might be four or five guys that will never be able to overcome that.

If Greg Biffle, for instance, has the same kind of issues at Bristol like he did at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in the series most recent outing - where fueling problems caused him to run out of gas - he will be further down the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings than he was there. He literally will be a bunch more laps down. If the guys that have had pit-road problems these first three races don’t have them corrected by Sunday after a week off, then watch them all go ballistic.

There are a lot of challenges now with the pit crew. While working on the car during the stop, there is the added wrinkle of new fuel, new fueling and one less man over the wall. Teams in the past that were good at building in adjustments to their race cars are struggling a little bit more because with one less man over pit wall this year, it takes longer to make changes to the car. That, in turn, keeps you on pit road longer and then the driver has to race his way back up through the field.

Everybody has to have his car pretty close to perfect when they arrive at the track for the first practice now. You simply don’t have the luxury of being able to spend a lot of time in practice chasing the car. Laying down a fast speed in practice carries over now to when you qualify because it sets the order, so the guys that can come off the truck already fast definitely have an advantage.

I think we are going to see more strategy in practice. It may be different from what it used to be. I am curious as to how these teams approach this, especially on a short track this weekend. Practice sessions now take on a whole different meaning.

Before this new procedure, if you got a late qualifying spot you knew you had an advantage. Now the luck part of it has basically been taken away. You have to earn a late draw. To do that though, you have to lay down a fast lap in practice, where the top speeds earn the final qualifying spots.

So the mindset of how these crew chiefs approach practice has changed somewhat.