Last season, when rain was forecast for the day Sprint Cup teams were set to qualify, there was a sense of dread around the Motorcraft/Quick Lane team. Running a part-time schedule at that time and with no owner points to fall back on, Ryan Blaney and the No. 21 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Fusion missed three races as a result of wet weather and cancelled qualifying.
Rain is in the forecast for this Friday at Pocono Raceway, but Blaney and the Motorcraft/Quick Lane team won’t have to worry about missing the race as there are just 40 entries for the 40 starting spots.
Still crew chief Jeremy Bullins is formulating a contingency plan in case showers do arrive at Pocono on Friday.
“You certainly can’t think of going to Pocono without expecting rain in the forecast, and this week looks no different,” Bullins said. “I hope that’s not the case as being Ryan’s first Cup start there we’d like to have all the practice we can get.”
Pocono is much different from the other venues on the Sprint Cup circuit due to the length and layout of the track.
Pocono Raceway covers 2.5 miles, with three distinct turns. Turn one, with 14 degrees of banking, was copied from the old Trenton Speedway in New Jersey. Turn two, better known as the tunnel turn, is banked nine degrees and patterned after Indianapolis Motor Speedway, while turn three, at six degrees, is made like the Milwaukee Mile.
Because of the difference in banking, and relatively low banking overall, combined with the shortness of the turns compared to the straightaways, speeds are slower than on oval tracks of the same length or shorter. The track record at Pocono, set in 2014 by Kyle Larson, is 183.438 miles per hour.
Even if it rains this weekend, Blaney won’t be completely without experience on the Tricky Triangle. He won a Camping World Truck Series race there in 2013 driving for Brad Keselowski Racing.
“It’s a track he’s had success at in the truck series, so that should help our learning curve,” Bullins said. “As long as rain doesn’t shorten Friday’s practice we will start in race trim to get a rhythm before swapping over to make some mock qualifying runs.
“That change takes 20-30 minutes, so if rain looks to affect that practice we will be in qualifying trim the whole time and count on Ryan to make the most of it.”
Bullins also will be making his Cup debut at Pocono, although like Blaney he has some experience there in the past. Bullins’ previous Pocono experience was as an engineer.
“Personally I love Pocono because of the strategy,” he said. “If you’re close enough to the leaders, you can pit without getting lapped which allows you to use a road-course strategy.”
That means stopping as soon as Blaney can make it to the end of the race, even if it means making a green-flag stop, which at most tracks would be a risky move.
“You pit as soon as you can make it to the end of the race on fuel and hope the caution comes out before everyone else pits so you can leap frog them while they are on pit road,” Bullins said. “All in all, it should be a fun weekend for us and a good challenge, racing somewhere with Ryan for the first time.”
Qualifying for the Axalta 400 is set for Friday at 4:15 p.m. and the race is scheduled to start just after 1 p.m. on Sunday with TV coverage on Fox Sports 1.
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