Welcome to the 2018 season and welcome back to our post-race column. As usual, we’ll have some random thoughts to take after the Cup Series races and this column will be the landing spot for them.
• The 2018 Cup Series season is seven races long, and NASCAR’s air gun experiment appears to have failed miserably so far.
Teams have had problems with the air guns provided by NASCAR in seemingly every race so far, and Kevin Harvick and his crew chief Rodney Childers were unhappy with the standard equipment Sunday.
NASCAR decided to provide teams with standard air guns in 2018 to help control costs and level the playing field on pit road. Teams were spending money to make air guns – the equipment that removes and attaches lug nuts to wheels – to make them as efficient and fast as possible.
But NASCAR’s weapons have proven unreliable. And perhaps that’s a good thing. Harvick had a loose wheel in Sunday’s race and had to make an extra pit stop because of it.
“We had a pathetic day on pit road, two days on pit road because of the pit cannons,” Harvick said. “When you have a pit gun problem like we’ve had a few times and we’ve been able to overcome it, today we couldn’t overcome it. Time and time again you are unable to tighten the lug nuts because the pit guns are not working.
Joe Gibbs, the owner of winner Kyle Busch’s car, is also not a fan of the NASCAR mandate.
Team owner Joe Gibbs doesn’t like the new guy #nascar-issued pit cannons: “I don’t like things that are out of our hands. To be completely honest, I’ve taken a stand on this. It’s something I hope We’ll continue to really evaluate that.”
-Nate Ryan (@nateryan) April 8, 2018
NASCAR has been defensive about air cannons, but it’s clear there is a widespread problem with the reliability of the equipment. It’s unfortunate that NASCAR tried to correct a problem and created a problem, but that’s what appears to have happened here. The problems cannot be resolved soon enough.
(Kevin Harvick takes advantage of NASCAR’s inconsistency)
• 2017 Xfinity Series champion William Byron scored the first top 10 of his Cup Series career on Sunday. Yes, there were only 10 cars on the lead lap at the end of the race, but you have to start somewhere.
“Overall it was a pretty good day and we can definitely build on that,” Byron said. “The repavings are really dangerous and the restarts were very summary. I learned a few things from adjusting the car to achieve this and overall I thought the green flag entries were good. The green flag stops, the guys did a good job. Overall, I thought it was pretty good. So it was a pretty solid day. A ton of stuff happened, but I thought we ended up where we should have.
• Joey Logano finished sixth, his third sixth-place finish of the season and the fifth time in seven races that he has finished in the top seven. He and his Team Penske teammates showed good speed, but not great speed, throughout the early part of the season. Although the team has been fast, they always seem to be overtaken by a Stewart-Haas Racing Ford or two.
“We made some good changes at the end,” Logano said. “My car was pretty good and probably could have finished third, but that caution came and these guys were hoping for it and they got it. They took the trail on us. We fought hard, that’s exactly where we are right now. We’re stuck in sixth grade. We have to go faster. »
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
Follow @NickBromberg on Twitter
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