Gordon believes it's time NASCAR do away with speed or timing lines on pit road and just enforce the speed limit on pit road from beginning to end.
Currently, NASCAR monitors the average speed of a car between timing lines. So in theory, a car can go faster than the limit in one area if it goes slower in another.
"I think that’s the next step. We’ve got to get rid of these speed lines. It doesn’t make any sense. The speed limit is the speed limit. You should never be able to break the speed limit," Gordon said. "You should 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 slowing down and that’s what got us in Martinsville. We were just too aggressive with it.”
Gordon is wrong, The real next step is to get rid of these pointless pit rules and revert back to the safer rules package that existed before March 1989 - leave pit road open at all times, no pit speed limits at all. This is what NASCAR had before it started closing pit road when the caution comes out after the 1989 Atlanta 500; it put in that rule because Darrell Waltrip, the race winner, complained the pace car picked up the wrong leader and put him a lap down, so NASCAR started closing pit road to end scoring problems; the problem is all it did was create pit crashes, and adding speed limits accomplished nothing.
ReplyDeleteGo back to what you had before March 1989 - get the officiating tower out of this control and give the control back to the racers.