 | | Greg Biffle called Sunday, "... the worst day of my life." Credit: CIA Stock Photo |
By Ryan Smithson, NASCAR.COM
March 23, 2005
01:00 PM EST (18:00 GMT)
Pit Story of the Race The final stop, which occurred on Lap 295, set the tone for the final 30 laps. Carl Edwards and Jimmie Johnson each beat Greg Biffle out of the pits. Biffle, who led 151 laps, never challenged again, leaving Johnson and Edwards to duke it out. Biffle's crew -- mostly revamped after some off-season defections -- was exceptional on Sunday until the final stop. "It was just the race off pit road," Biffle said. "Man, I was so excited. My guys -- you watched the broadcast. I don't know if they had us going down pit road on TV, but I'd beat them out of the pits by 20 car lengths on every stop. "And then the second-to-last stop, the 48 (Johnson) beat us, and the last stop, the 48 and 99 (Edwards) beat us. That's the way racing is." Edwards knew how valuable the work of his pit crew was. "My pit crew got us off pit road first on that last pit stop and that was unbelievable," Edwards said. "If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't have been in position to win." Getting better and better Johnson got beaten on the final lap, but his pit crew got stronger and stronger as the race wore on. On the next-to-last stop, Chad Knaus' crew gave its driver the lead with a 13.5-second stop, its fastest of the day. On the final stop, Johnson lost the race off pit road despite a 14.5-second stop. "It seems that between the Roush teams and the Hendrick teams that we all have the same stuff," said Johnson. "It boils down to pit stops and stuff like that." Vickers' pit crew gives him career best finish Brian Vickers finished a career-high sixth, mainly because his pit crew gained him four spots on the final stop. Vickers didn't need any gas on the Lap 295 stop, going from eighth to fourth during the pit sequence. "We have a good pit crew and those guys just get better and better every week," Vickers said. "You can tell they really want it and it's a lot easier to pass guys on pit road than it is to pass them on the race track." The lack of fuel had a side effect -- it made his Chevrolet extremely tight as the track cooled, and Mark Martin and Kasey Kahne caught Vickers in the closing laps. Speeding penalty costs Earnhardt Jr.  |  | PIT MOVE ARCHIVE | |
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Dale Earnhardt Jr. was nailed for speeding twice early in the event, costing him two laps. He finished 24th, his third finish in a row out of the top 20. NASCAR times the cars from cone to cone on pit road, and Earnhardt Jr. thought he could accelerate after he cleared the first pit box. "I apologize getting us into a hole," he told his crew. "I just forgot it was the cones. I thought it was the midline in between the box and the cone, and I took off." | 
