In the aftermath of a race crash, teams launch into action to assess the possibility of continuing a race. Unfortunately, the situation is often terminal, and during those times, it's time to pack up and go home. In other cases, though, the car may be able to continue. The only way to know is to get the car to its pit to check it out and, hopefully, get it back on the track.
The need to stay on the track is vital because in today's racing environment, every point lost can literally cost thousands of dollars, so it stands to reason that teams will do whatever it takes to keep running.
That was the situation for the Square D team in the Pennsylvania 500 race at Pocono. Driver Kenny Wallace got caught up in a track melee with Geoffrey Bodine and Jerry Nadeau going into Turn 1. After the crash, the #55 car managed to get back to the pits, where the damage assessment began.
To get the real skinny of what happened during this sequence, we turned to Crew Chief Jimmy Elledge. Here is what he told us about the event:
The first thing we did was to talk to Kenny and make sure he was OK--that's the most important communication that we have. Once we knew he was all right, we asked about the oil pressure and water temperature. In a crash of any kind, you can lose an oil-pump belt, oil line, or have a break in the water system. If the water temperature or oil pressure were bad, you wouldn't want to have the car driven any further. It would be a waste to blow an engine just limping into the pits.
Once we were satisfied that the vital signs were good and the car could still roll, we got Kenny to the pit stall. With the car in the pits, the first obvious thing was to change the flat tires on the right side--the left side was still up. Then we tore off the fenders and did a quick assessment of the rear deck. All of this was being done while our spotter kept us informed about the location of the pace car.
When the car was patched up enough to go back out and the NASCAR inspector gave us the OK, Kenny went out ahead of the pace car so we could stay on the lead lap. During this lap, Kenny radioed that the car was not handling. When he came back in, we jacked the car up and saw that there were some real problems. The rear clip was bent and the whole rear section was too low to the ground, so we took the car behind the wall to take a closer look.
In the garage, we saw it was terminal because there weren't enough laps left to fix the problems.
It wasn't an end that we wanted, but we have to deal with it. When a car is wrecked, sometimes you can luck out and are able to finish the race, but other times you can't. This was one of those times when lady luck did not smile on us, so we put it behind us and started thinking about the next race.