Pit Road Penalty Relegates No. 48 to 16th-Place Finish
For the third time in a row at Dover International Speedway, Jimmie Johnson led over half the laps in the Sprint Cup Series event. But while the first two trips ended in Victory Lane, this one ended in disappointment after a late-race penalty on pit road forced Johnson to a 16th-place result.
Johnson started the 400-lap race from the fifth spot and took command early, grabbing the lead for the first time on Lap 24 and leading a total of 225 laps, the most of any driver.
Johnson spent much of his afternoon battling with eventual race winner Kyle Busch but was the class of the field and looked to be closing in on his seventh Dover win.
As teams made their final green-flag pit stops of the afternoon with fewer than 40 laps remaining, Johnson and Busch entered pit road together, in first and second places.
Following a speedy pit stop by the Lowe’s crew, Johnson exited his pit and pulled alongside Busch, barely edging past him to retake the lead off pit road. But as Johnson came up to speed on the one-mile concrete oval, NASCAR communicated to the team that the No. 48 Lowe’s Chevrolet had surpassed pit road speed upon exit and Johnson was forced to return to the pit lane for a pass-through penalty.
“I had been leaving the pit box really good each time and there are some cues there from the spotter and we need to be able to calculate where we need to check up to be doing the right thing,” explained Johnson. “And evidently I just got out of the pits much better than I did any other time. As I got to my mark I heard my spotter and saw my lights and I was conservative because I didn’t want to make any mistakes in the end and I saw Kyle was going to beat me so I just kind of gave up that final segment off pit road and I got nailed.”
The penalty resulted in Johnson losing a lap to the leaders and he was never able to make up the lost positions.
“When I look back at the last few races I know the results aren’t what we want,” said Johnson. “But we were competitive at some of the tracks and we had bad luck at some of the tracks, and today we lead a lot of laps and ran up front so it’s a long season and there are tracks that are good for race teams and there are tracks that are bad for race teams and we knew coming here this would be good and next week at Charlotte is going to be another good one for the 48 team and hopefully we don’t leave a trophy behind there.”
Johnson’s 16th-place finish moved him to fourth in the driver point standings, now 131 points behind leader Kevin Harvick.
