Crew chief Ford confident in race strategy, Hamlin

LONG POND, Pa. -- You can talk all you want about setting up a car to handle Pocono's three unique corners and three straightaways. You can talk about horsepower and braking and shock packages and aerodynamics. You can talk and talk until you are blue in the face.

But the "smartest man in the room" after Sunday's Gillette Fusion ProGlide 500 said he was worried about something different in the closing laps.

Mike Ford proved again that the delicate balance between track position and the amount of the fuel in the race car was probably foremost on every crew chief's mind at that critical point of the race. Ford played his hand perfectly, pitting to guarantee enough fuel to go the distance but not giving up so much track position that his driver couldn't make up the ground in the laps remaining.

Of course, it helps to have Denny Hamlin piloting the car.

"All strategies came into play," Ford said after celebrating in Victory Lane. "You had different tire strategies, fuel strategies, then you had guys on three different sequences of tires at the end of the day to add for a pretty eventful end to the race.

"Track position was key. I think the key for us winning that race was two restarts that Denny made when we gave up track position. That was the key to us winning the race. You didn't want to give up track position, but you needed fuel at some point."

Think it's easy being a Sprint Cup crew chief? Consider the decisions made up and down pit road in the final 44 laps on Sunday. When debris brought out the yellow flag on Lap 155, all the leaders stopped for fuel, even though no one had been able to run more than 38 laps on a single tank all day. That guaranteed that every car would have to pit at least once more.

So even though Hamlin put the No. 11 Toyota out front, Ford's brain was already in major calculation mode. And the problem became exponentially more complicated when Casey Mears spun on the restart, which allowed many of the lead-lap cars near the tail end of the field -- like Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Sam Hornish Jr. and Juan Montoya -- to gamble on topping off their cars. (Continued)