NOTES: Like Kurt Busch, Greg Biffle and A.J. Allmendinger also were without their regular crew chiefs at Pocono Raceway as their crew chiefs served suspensions handed to them because of rules infractions committed at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
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NASCAR made repeated attempts to dry the race track between rain showers when visibility allowed Sunday until the determination was made that the day’s weather would not improve and daylight hours became limited at the unlit track. The 41 (Busch) got a good run and I didn’t do a good enough job holding him off. The Hendrick Motorsports rookie who replaced Jeff Gordon in the No. 24 Chevy stumbled off late restarts that forced him to fall short at the end.
Crew members push the vehicle of Kyle Larson in the garage area before the NASCAR Sprint Cup series auto … Instead, he was held up by teammate Chase Elliott, who led 51 laps and also wanted to regain the advantage of clean air. His 809 laps led through the first 13 races are 242 more than his total all of last season and his two top-five finishes and six top-10s aren’t far removed from his 2015 pace.
“We just kept him informed on everything that was going on, and he took it and ran with it”, Klausmeier said.
Told his Chevrolet was two laps shy of having enough fuel for the finishing push, Busch did all he could to save, scrimp and stretch over the final five laps.
Matt Kenseth’s No. 20 Toyota was fast enough to lead 31 laps in the Axalta “We Paint Winners” 400 at Pocono Raceway.
“I don’t think of us as a team that is a qualifying-focused team”, Keselowski said.
The other restarts Monday didn’t seem to hamper Elliott.
“I should have been able to defend that a little bit better. They said two”, he said.
This race, the 14th of 36 races on the Sprint Cup circuit, marks the first Cup event of the season that been postponed to the following day. “Certainly learned a ton, got a real good attitude, really calm, doesn’t get excited about much, and he’s got a really, really good crew chief [Alan Gustafson], a guy that I think really is wrapping his arms around the idea of working with Chase and grooming Chase”. The 10 cautions covered 40 laps, or one-fourth of the race.
Of course, so has Busch, whose career was in jeopardy at the start of the 2015 season when he was suspended indefinitely by NASCAR for “conduct detrimental to stock auto racing”, after reports of a physical incident with an ex-girlfriend became national news. “Like I said, we’ve been so close, it’s just a matter of getting that off our shoulders, and now we can just build our notebook for the Chase”.
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When told that the FS1 television broadcast indicated it was similar to a modification the team made earlier in the year when one of his pit crew members hip-checked the vehicle, Keselowski had a critical response toward FS1 analyst Jeff Gordon, the recently retired four-time Sprint Cup champion and still current equity owner in Hendrick Motorsports. Kyle Larson won the rain-shortened NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Pocono on Saturday, leading 27 of the 53 completed laps. After serving one year with Casey Mears, he would oversee the retirement tours for Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon. “I know Gibson can do it just the same, but when you have a new guy or somebody different and you’re not at your full strength, there’s something that happens to everybody on the team”.
