Equipment malfunction ruins Martin's shot at victory
LONG POND, Pa. – Mark Martin had a dominant car at Pocono Raceway, but an equipment malfunction on pit road spoiled his chances Sunday.
Martin led 53 of the first 67 laps but two slow pit stops – the result of lug nuts getting stuck in a new socket that screws in the lug nuts – cost him too much time on pit road, forcing his Dale Earnhardt Inc. team to play pit strategy. Martin wound up finishing eighth in the Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500.
“I told them, ‘Don’t be disappointed with what you didn’t get done today – be excited about what you did do,’” Martin said. “These guys get it done every week on pit road. I don’t think we’ve had a disappointing pit stop all year long [and] so we had a couple of snags today.
“We had the race car we were looking for at Indy [last week] here and I look forward to driving it again.”
Crew chief Tony Gibson seemed a little flabbergasted after Martin started second and seemed to have the car to beat.
“You can’t run the same socket all year long,” Gibson said. “You’ve got to eventually change it because it will break. Something about it hung up on a nut. It wasn’t [the crew’s] fault. They didn’t do anything wrong.
“It kind of threw us out of our gameplan and got us off sync on fuel. But, hey, we had the car to beat here today by far, and that was a good day for us. I wish we would have won it. Should have won it. But it didn’t happen.”
Those two pit stops dropped Martin to 16th. When rain came on lap 128, Martin and Gibson opted to stay out while many of the leaders pitted. Needing two more stops once the race resumed, while others needed just one, Martin still was able to work his way to eighth. Kasey Kahne, who finished seventh and had won at Pocono in June, was the only driver to finish ahead of Martin who was on the same pit strategy.
“In a run and a half, we made up almost an entire pit stop [on the field],” Martin said. “Kasey Kahne was really, really good. We were pretty close to him on speed. We had a great race car, and I’m very proud of that. … We had one good enough to win with if everything would have went our way, but it didn’t.”
Martin is committed to getting the DEI team a win before he leaves at the end of the season for Hendrick Motorsports.
“We’ve had four of them we should have won but we didn’t,” Gibson said. “I told [team owner] Teresa [Earnhardt] last week that we’re just really close and if we could ever get a little bit of luck on our side, we could win one or two of them at least. We’re going to keep digging. One of these days, it’s going to be our day.”
