NASCAR Cup Series crew chiefs found out about the wide application of PJ1 to the bottom groove of Bristol Motor Speedway on race day morning the same way as most everyone else in the industry in the form of a memo.
“Following a discussion with drivers, Goodyear and the race track, NASCAR will apply approximately two feet of PJ1 to the bottom of the racing surface and clean the top groove of excess rubber.”
Drew Blickensdefer, crew chief of the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 10 team, was caught off guard by it.
“Yeah, no idea on the crew chief side,” Blickensderfer said. “It’s frustrating because you work a month leading up into this race, trying to prepare for what you had in the spring to make it good, then we had 45 minutes of practice, we made the guess overnight that it’s going to be a top dominant race, just to find out a 1 o’clock that they’re going to spray PJ1 and scrape the top, the rubber off the top.
“You don’t know what to expect, so it’s frustrating at our level, especially it being a cutoff race.”
Speaking of it being a cutoff race, RFK Racing No. 6 crew chief is trying to engineer Brad Keselowski into the second round of the playoffs, and now the race is taking place on a different ballfield of sorts.
“There was no meeting on our end,” McCall said. “I just got the email saying they’re putting down up to two feet of PJ1 on the bottom and that’s all we knew.”
It forced every crew chief to go into overdrive when the garage opened at 3:30 ET on Saturday. Ultimately, everyone agrees that it’s the same for everyone but it a challenge to overcome over 500 laps.
“It’s going to change the race for sure,” McCall said, “but we don’t know the magnitude, right? We don’t entirely know what the tire wear is going to be. Having the Xfinity and ARCA cars here this week changed that from March.
“But (the PJ1) is going to wear off to a degree, right, and so even if the first part of the race is bottom heavy, it’s going to drift back up towards the top because it always does.”
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