Jeff Gordon is an advocate for a consistent pit road speed limit
Jeff Gordon has a novel idea for pit road: a consistent speed limit.
NASCAR pit roads have a posted speed limit, but the limit is enforced via timing lines. Pit road is divided into multiple timing segments and the time it would take you to travel the pit road speed in a designated segment is the speed limit.
So when a driver pits, he can drive faster than the posted speed limit in the segment his stall is located in. The time spent pitting will outweigh the time gained by speeding the rest of the segment.
It’s how Brad Keselowski once gained a ton of spots on pit road at Bristol throughout a race (much to others’ chagrin) and why you see drivers speeding up and slowing down during a cycle of pit stops.
Now that NASCAR has a new pit road officiating system that uses cameras and replays to more accurately officiate pit stops, Gordon, who sped on pit road two weeks ago at Martinsville while leading and had to fight back for a top 10, says it’s time for a consistent speed limit.
“That was just us trying to take advantage of speed lines,” Gordon said. “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. 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.”
For a series that once timed pit road speed by hand, electronic timing on pit road is quite the technological advancement. However, the pit road officiating system is clearly a much larger one, and proof that NASCAR is capable of developing a system that tracks cars’ speed throughout the entirety of pit road, either through radar, GPS, a combination of both or a different technology altogether.
And our guess is that it’ll happen sometime in the near future. Though not near enough for Gordon, who’s set to end driving full-time in the Cup Series after the 2015 season.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
