Four-time champion a fan of automated pit-road officiating system
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RELATED: How pit road speed limit is calculated
FORT WORTH, Texas — Count Jeff Gordon among the fans of NASCAR’s new automated pit-road officiating system. Now, the Hendrick Motorsports driver says it’s time to make another sweeping change.
Gordon advocated for a pit road system that did not rely on the use of electronic timing loops, which lay below the pavement and use distance over time to calculate speed in a number of sections. The speed limit, he said, should be uniform across the entire length of pit road.
“I think that’s the next step,” Gordon said Friday at Texas Motor Speedway. “You gotta get rid of these speed lines. The speed limit is the speed limit. You should never be able to break the speed limit, you should have to carry the speed limit all the way down pit road.
“What we do is find pit stalls to try to get around that, so we’re ramping up and then slowing down.”
That’s precisely what happened to Gordon last week at Martinsville Speedway, when a speeding penalty cost him a shot at winning. The No. 24 Chevrolet pitted from the lead with 36 laps to go in the STP 500, but was nabbed for speeding.
Gordon said he was too aggressive in trying to go faster in the section around his pit box, noting that because he had to slow down to pit, he could go faster than the speed limit to make up the difference under the current configuration.
The unique layout of pit roads at short tracks such as Martinsville make it more difficult to gain an advantage without crossing the line, but it’s also at those short tracks where the new system shines.
“Last week when I was leaving my box — and I was in kind of one of the first boxes around Turns 1 and 2 — it was everything I could do to not hit the pit crew guys that were working the car in front of me,” Gordon said. “If there had been a NASCAR official there, I would have been avoiding them and possibly getting into the side of one of the other cars coming around me on the outside to avoid hitting the NASCAR official. I think it’s a big, big plus to have less people out there under this new system.
“And I think the camera system speaks for itself. It’s black and white, if you want to put it that way. It’s made all of us have to be that much cleaner and do our jobs that much better.”
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