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LONG POND — Four Sprint Cup Series teams participated in a two-day Goodyear tire test Tuesday and Wednesday in preparation for June’s Axalta, “We Paint Winners” 400 at Pocono Raceway.
Drivers taking part at the Tricky Triangle were defending race winner Martin Truex Jr., the Chevrolet teams of Ryan Newman and Kyle Larson and Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski, who is also a former Cup winner at Pocono.
Newman ran into trouble on Day 1 as his Richard Childress Racing team shipped up another car from their shop in Welcome, N.C. for the second day of testing.
“We had a tire go down, not a tire problem,” Newman said. “It was either cut something or had some kind of leak and failed a tire, so we had to get another car shipped up here last night, got here this morning and the guys switched it over. We’ve had a busy day-and-a-half of testing so far, but don’t have a lot to show for it.”
The Purdue University graduate wasn’t the only one who experienced issues Tuesday. Third-year Cup driver Kyle Larson had a close call in his No. 42 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet while testing around the 2.5-mile Pocono Raceway.
“The car feels similar to how I raced here last time and I think we’ve actually improved on it some,” Larson said. “We’ve had to work through a couple issues throughout both days, was having brake problems yesterday getting a long pedal after a few laps. We had a tire sensor go bad and go flat right-rear. “
“Newman maybe had a left-front issue there. I almost wrecked, he did end up wrecking. Broke a power-steering fitting yesterday, so lost power-steering into the Tunnel Turn, so it’s been kind of a mess for us, but when we have been able to make smooth runs, we’ve been alright.”
NASCAR banned teams from private testing after the 2014 season and only can a take part in a series or Goodyear-sanctioned test to work with the new low-downforce package introduced last year at Kentucky Speedway and Darlington Raceway.
“Testing anymore is pretty much limited to Goodyear tire tests and from our standpoint, it’s an opportunity to go out and validate the simulation tools that we have, all the things that we want to do, but never really get a chance to do anymore which is good because it’s pretty evenly spread and distributed amongst all the teams,” Newman said.
The RCR driver hasn’t won a Cup race in three years, but came within a few car lengths of winning the 2014 Sprint Cup championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Last June, Pocono’s Turn 2 was extremely bumpy as drivers negotiated their cars carefully around the Tunnel Turn. After the race weekend, the track fixed it up before August’s NASCAR and Verizon IndyCar Series races.
More improvements were made to the racetrack over the winter, including adding more SAFER barriers around the facility and a new catchfence on the front-straightaway.
“My friends in the ski business weren’t very happy, but I can tell you our construction crews were thrilled with the warmer weather,” Track president and CEO Brandon Igdalsky said. “When you sit in the office and hear the cars on the track, it’s a true sign spring’s coming if it’s not here already in the Poconos, but it gets our staff pumped up. It’s crunch time now. It’s the end of our set-up process is getting everything wrapped up in a few weeks.”
The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series makes its first of two visits in 2016 to Pocono in June for the Axalta, “We Paint Winners” 400, along with the inaugural event for the XFINITY Series and the return of the ARCA Racing Series presented by Menards.