It’s no secret that the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing pit crew of Denny Hamlin’s car this season is in a slump. This was a crew leading the charts in individual and average pit stop time for the first quarter of the 2024 season. But as the playoffs approached, things seemingly started to fall apart, leaving the fate of Hamlin’s appearance in the NASCAR Cup Series Championship 4 round at Phoenix in uncertain hands.
It’s not that a driver’s performance can’t make an impact on a race, but a pit crew can certainly make or break it. We saw this with the No. 11 crew’s heroic performance in the final laps of the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway in March. Hamlin entered pit lane in third but his pit crew sent him out into first place as they beat the crews of the two leading cars by over a second. We’ve also seen the flip side of this over the summer as the No. 11 crew moved too quickly during a pit stop at the Hollywood Casino 400 at Kansas Speedway that resulted in having to jack the car back up to tighten a right rear wheel which lost them over ten positions while sitting on pit road.
“They were just outlier good,” shared the No. 11’s Crew Chief, Chris Gabehart. “My group is a hard working group, very analytical group and they kind of tried to make that better but couldn’t. Then they got into some injuries — that has probably not been very high profile for eight, or ten, maybe twelve races changed the way they could approach the week.”
Top tier NASCAR pit crews spend about three to four days per week on practice and preparation for races. The daily schedule is typically set up in multiple hourly blocks split between things like pit stop practice, weight training, cardio, rehab, and film review. With NASCAR racing on so many different types of tracks, this means that there are typically new positions for things like the wheels each week because of changes to suspension setups. So the pit crew needs weekly practice to get used to that new specific setup. Organizations like Joe Gibbs Racing also have development pit crew members that they can use as backups, for instance to use when one of their crewmates are injured, but pit stops require so much chemistry and tight choreography that it can take weeks for a new member of crew to get into that rhythm, let alone adjust for the unique setups from track to track.
“When you’re hurt you can’t practice like you were, especially when you were thrashing every week when that’s kind of your style. So, they had to throttle back a little bit,” Gabehart said. “Then the pressure of the playoffs comes and it’s very disjointed as you know. You go from an Atlanta to a Talladega to a road course, and for a pit crew it’s hard to find a weekly rhythm because races aren’t pit-crew focused. Then you’re expected to step up at Kansas and perform and step up at Bristol and perform — so I think it’s been a rhythm thing for that group coupled with the pressure of the playoffs as any pit crew is going to live. We’ve seen that.”
Based on Gabehart comments it’s easy to see how lower profile injuries can impact the success of a pit crew. Having races like Atlanta and Watkins Glen to start the playoffs doesn’t help restore that cadence either, as those races are more reliant on fuel fill time than tire change time, so it wasn’t until Bristol before the crew had an opportunity to follow a rhythm where they needed to complete fast tire changes.
They still had some hiccups after that but Gabehart is confident in their performance and what he observed at Homestead last weekend.
“The speed and the greatness is still there, we just got to put a whole race together.”
