And you could be dead on correct. Kurt is having a jam up start. So maybe the problem is Hendrick overall? Who knows?
It's definitely a Hendrick problem and it's not their engines. Ganassi has top 5 speed in both cars. Hendrick struggles to run 15th and are racing around the JTG cars which are significantly less funded.
Bowman has been the 2nd best HMS driver in qualifying at all 3 races and has out qualified Chase at all 3 races. He just doesn't seem to have any luck on race day and his pit crew has lost him a lot of spots on race day. I have a pretty strong feeling that he will win 1 or more races this year.
They mentioned this during the broadcast, but interesting enough, Gustafson said their car drove beautifully all weekend but lacked straight line speed. When has that ever been an issue for HMS? Just bizarre.
I kept my mouth shut but yeah a good driving car is usually a slower car. Straight line speed is much faster when tied to a fast corner. KDB was cutting some good ones.
Which would be interesting considering how good HMS usually are in qualifying at Daytona and Talladega the past few years - very trimmed out and/or very good HP levels, but then don't usually fare as well in the draft. A place like Fontana obviously isn't the exact same, but given the new rules for 2019 you'd think some of the same concepts apply. Perhaps they went too far in the other direction.
Hard to tell, but Nascar standardized the splitter and the pan underneath the cars and this is all new after the Chevy car was designed and that changed the downforce/drag alot.
Yeah this must have been when he drove his way up to 10th or so before the stage break. Interesting stuff.
I believe so. He surged shortly after, but said that the tires were so shot at end of the run that he was bleeding positions back again. There's been a lot of talk "in code" as well. Chase will give detailed feedback and Alan will say "yeah, I know what it is. We'll talk about it later, nothing I can do on a pit stop." That sort of thing. At Cali this weekend Chase said something about "knowing what to talk about in team meeting" when relating to a setup issue. It wasn't angry or anything, just a "I have something that I can't say over the radio" kind of thing. It's things like that which give me the only hope I can cling onto right now as a Chase fan. Losing Rex to SHR several years ago has really come back to bite HMS.
they haven't been doing well at the larger tracks, Larson and Kurt have better results at the larger tracks so far.
Pretty odd for Penske or any of the top teams for that matter to have three different mechanical problems that took cars out of the running. They were fast though. The Hendrick cars were too. I was starting to think it was the drivers, but they found something.
