Six-time champion bounced back for fifth-place finish at Daytona
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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — NASCAR installed a new pit road officiating system for the 2015 season designed to increase safety and add extra levels of technological precision to ensure teams were being held fully accountable for their in-race actions.
In Sunday’s 57th running of the Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway in the first full-field NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race under the new format, plenty of teams were hit with penalties detected by the new system — including the typically flawless No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports crew for six-time champion Jimmie Johnson.
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On Lap 87, NASCAR hit the 48 team with a pass-through penalty for an infraction of having a crew member over the wall too soon, one of six teams hit during that round of green-flag stops.
The only problem?
Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus had no idea what they’d done wrong.
“NASCAR … I would appreciate an explanation,” Knaus asked over the 48 team radio. “We do not know what we did wrong.”
After serving the penalty, the 48 car stood in 35th place — the last car on the lead lap.
Johnson had plenty of race left to make up the track position lost — he ultimately finished fifth — but the Hendrick Motorsports driver really needed to battle on the 2.5-mile superspeedway to get back to the front of the pack.
“(It made our day) more difficult,” Johnson said. “To almost lose a lap and then come back and have to start dead last and climb my way up through the middle, I took a lot of risks to get up there. We did have to work a lot today.”
The biggest issue that Johnson and Knaus had with the penalty was that despite their efforts to contact NASCAR through the radio, they said no response was given — the two still were in the dark as to what happened and why they were penalized long after the checkered flag fell in favor of race-winner Joey Logano.
In essence, the penalties could’ve kept happening for the 48 team and they wouldn’t have known how to correct them, Johnson said.
“We couldn’t get clarification on why we were penalized, so in order for us to make a correction for the other three or four stops, we didn’t know what to do,” Johnson said. “We just kind of went back to doing our thing like we had been and fortunately there were no more penalties.
“We’ll get clarification (from NASCAR) as the week develops. It’d be nice to know during the race so we can make an adjustment.”
As far as if Knaus plans on reaching out to NASCAR officials for an explanation of what went wrong prior to the Sprint Cup Series’ next race, the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Sunday (1 p.m. ET, FOX), the longtime 48 pit boss said “I’m sure at some point (we will).”
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