No. 22 Team Penske pit crew undergoes minimal personnel changes
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A handful of professional athletes who enjoyed success over the course of a career have been — fairly or unfairly — remembered for their clutch-moment gaffes. Bill Buckner and Leon Lett come to mind.
Joey Logano made it clear he doesn’t want his pit crew lumped in on the list of other infamous goats from the world of sports.
The Team Penske No. 22 pit crew remains largely intact for the 2015 season, even after an agonizingly mistake-laden, late-race stop in last year’s finale with the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship on the line. The crucial stop was a 49.3-second disaster that severely hampered Logano’s best chance thus far at wearing the NASCAR crown.
But the 24-year-old driver, entering his third season driving for team owner Roger Penske said judging his over-the-wall crew’s body of work on the basis of one wayward stop was unfair.
“The whole year combined, they were the fourth- or fifth-best pit crew, and I hate to see the rap that they got after one stop, you know?” Logano said Wednesday during Team Penske‘s stop on the annual Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour presented by Technocom. “And yes, it could have been the most important stop of the year. Did it prevent us from winning a championship? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t take away from the year they had as a pit crew. It doesn’t take away from the year we had as the 22 car, winning races and leading laps and top-fives — all the great things we did. That doesn’t take away from that. I hate to see them get a bad rap over that.”
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That bad rap included the No. 22 crew taking the brunt of the jokes from comedian Jay Mohr during last December’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Awards banquet. Crew chief Todd Gordon said though the long faces on the over-the-wall bunch were evident after the car fell off the jack late in last season’s finale, the criticism and ribbing weeks removed from the miscue were taken in stride.
“We’ve got a lot of maturity in that group. I won’t call them old because I want to separate age from maturity,” Gordon said. “Hey, you know what — it’s performance sports. There’s receivers who drop balls, there’s quarterbacks that throw interceptions, and there’s guys that hit pop-flys in baseball. You’re going to have that happen. The great part is, everybody has looked at it, identified it; we said what could we all do differently.
“I was asking the jackman to do some things a little more aggressively all year because it would make our race cars faster, and as we picked up speed, I probably put him in a position where he was in a vulnerable position to fail. So I’ll take some ownership, he’ll take some ownership, and we’ve identified what we need to work on. We’ve worked on that, and I think we’ll be better for it this year.”
The jackman, Ray Gallahan, returns to the fold for 2015, as does most of the over-the-wall crewmembers from last season. The only major personnel change was bringing in Eric Groen over from the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 team as a replacement at rear-tire carrier for Larry Robinett, who remains with the team in an in-house capacity in the shop.
For the 77-year-old team owner, known as “The Captain” for his leadership qualities and business acumen, the method of approaching the mishap was an easy choice. Penske could have just as easily berated the crew in general or Gallahan specifically, but that decision would have been uncharacteristic.
“From our perspective, the individual that was our jackman there has done such a great job for us. He’s a pro, he’s an elite jackman up and down the pit road — anybody would hire him today — and to me, it was just one of those days,” Penske said. “It was the money stop. Unfortunately, the car slipped off the jack and to me, as far as I’m concerned, nothing we could do about it so let’s move on. I talked to him that night after the race and said, ‘Hey, man. You’re on the team. You’ve gotten us here, so let’s move on.’ To me, it was more of supporting him than saying what happened.”