LONG POND — Pocono Raceway doesn’t offer the steep banking or the long strings of drafting cars so prevalent on NASCAR Sprint Cup restrictor-plate tracks like Daytona or Talladega.
However, Sunday’s GoBowling.com 400 did produce something like those speedways.
The Big One.
With 42 laps remaining, 13 cars went into the first turn on a restart and stopped there in a massive crash that brought back memories of similar wrecks on the higher-banked superspeedways.
“It’s tough to pass on a long run and I think your best chance to make up positions is on a restart because it’s double-file restarts and you get two, three, four wide going into (Turn) 1 and then singles out. The first turn is always a mess,” Brian Vickers, whose No. 55 Toyota T-boned the wall in front of the field, said after exiting the Lehigh Valley
Health Network Care Center at the track.
Unlike many tracks in which the entrance to the third of four turns is often the fastest point, Pocono’s odd triangle features the longest straightaway, 3,740 feet, in NASCAR and Sprint Cup cars surpass 200 mph before entering the turn, which veers sharply off 14-degree banking.
In Sunday’s accident, the cars had just exited the corner when the crash started as Denny Hamlin, already coping with the absence of suspended crew chief Darien Grubb, spun.
“I was the car behind him and he was a car-length behind me, so I definitely didn’t get into him,” Vickers said. “I think he was in the middle of three (cars) wide and got loose coming out of Turn 1, and then it was just a chain reaction after that.”
Hamlin agreed, saying, “We’re all just fighting for positions on restarts because we can’t pass after you get three laps on your tires. These cars put such a big wake in the air you just can’t overcome it.”
With Hamlin’s spin, the day changed for a lot of drivers.
By the time the smoke cleared, former Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart’s car landed on top of Paul Menard’s No. 27.
“Our cars tend to land on top of each other,” Stewart said. “I think that’s the second time that’s happened. At least this time, we weren’t looking windshield to windshield in at each other.”
Menard said, “The last time we did that was about two years ago at Talladega. We’ve got to stop doing that.”
Aric Almirola, who managed to drive his mangled Richard Petty-owned No. 43 to the garage for repairs, also felt he was a victim of circumstance.
“I was on the brakes as hard as I could and I got creamed from behind and pushed into the wreck,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do when it gets like that, so it was just a big pileup trying to get all we can get on the restarts.”
Although 13 cars were involved, only four were actually disabled in the crash. Another, the No. 47 of A.J. Allmendinger, hit the wall again just a few laps after repairs of that car were completed.
But the biggest impact was The Big One may have determined the finish of the race.
While eventual winner Dale Earnhardt Jr. passed Greg Biffle, who was conserving fuel mileage, with 14 laps left for the race-winning move, Earnhardt still had to fend off Kevin Harvick, who was involved in the crash.
“I just hung a left and I just wasn’t expecting a 2-foot-by-2-foot drain to be a foot down into the ground as I went down through the asphalt,” Harvick said of his role in the melee. “As I went through the drain and jumped up out of it, it hung a left in the wall. We had the wreck cleared, but timed the drain wrong, I guess.”
Harvick said the impact damaged the splitter and caved both front fenders on the tires, but the crew repaired those items quickly and Harvick then worked his way forward, eventually sharing the front row with Earnhardt on a restart with four laps remaining.
And that’s when The Big One might have spoiled Harvick’s day.
“At the end, I was a touch tight in all of the corners, so it definitely affected it some,” Harvick said of his car, noting Earnhardt was able to maintain momentum better on the final restart from the outside groove.
But in the end, Earnhardt’s crew chief, Steve Letarte, could only relax when Earnhardt finally got that lead to stay.
Letarte said, “Kevin Harvick was crashed under the caution … Twenty laps later, we’re racing Kevin Harvick (for the win), so you don’t ever want to assume anything.”