CONCORD, N.C. — A key finding for teams after two days of testing on Charlotte Motor Speedway’s road course configuration is how quickly trouble will find you. After an eventful Tuesday at the 2.28-mile circuit, two bends — Turns 1 and 3 — are in the early running for most treacherous.
Rookie William Byron’s hard hit early in the afternoon session was the biggest pitfall of the two-day test, held on consecutive Tuesdays on the combination oval and road course. The track time was the latest step in preparations for the Bank of America Roval 400, the first road-course event in NASCAR postseason history on Sept. 30.
RELATED: Photos from Charlotte testing
Byron’s Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 Chevrolet nosed into the tire barrier rounding Turn 1 after a brake failure. The hard left-hander that leads to the track’s infield portion also was the site of fellow rookie Bubba Wallace’s sizable crash last week.
“I think just going over the curbs and everything, we just snapped a brake line and the pedal went to the floor,” said Byron, who was evaluated and released from the infield care center, unhurt. “I’ve never had that happen, but it was not fun.”
Byron’s crack-up preceded a trio of morning excursions with varying damage in Turn 3, the off-camber corner that marks the first right-hander on the course. Ryan Blaney got the worst of those, with Alex Bowman and Erik Jones escaping with minor to no impact.
“It’s just a really awkward section through there where we’ve been free in throughout the day and tried to work on it, but just got in a little too hot,” Bowman said of his incident, which caused minimal damage to the front of his No. 88 Chevrolet. “It was (either) KO the tire barriers or spin it out. I spun it out and still got them a little bit, but just part of it.”
WATCH: Bowman explains what happened
Joey Logano, one of 14 drivers participating in Tuesday’s test, said he found out during a sponsorship shoot last week how tricky the corner is. In some spirited recreational driving in a classic Cobra, Logano said the car drifted out of the groove shortly after the downhill corner entry, prompting him to wonder whether the turn would have the same effect on Monster Energy Series cars.
“Pretty quickly I realized that we are going to fight that quite a bit,” Logano said. “The corner itself, you’re just turning to the right, there’s no banking and you’re going downhill and the car’s just super, super loose there. It’s a pretty sketchy corner. That’s probably one of the … there’s a few sketchy spots, but that’s probably one of the sketchiest if not the sketchiest.”
Competition officials made further adjustments to the course Tuesday morning by removing rumble strips at Turn 8, a transitional left-hand curve that funnels cars out of the infield section onto the oval track’s Turn 1 banking. Drivers had skirted the corner by bounding their cars over the strips, prompting officials to make the transition earlier.
That tweak followed last week’s more robust adjustment to add definition to the backstretch chicane.
WATCH: Take a lap around the course