Denny Hamlin explains what caused crucial speeding penalties for Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson at Pocono

One of the biggest game-changers to the Cup Series race at Pocono over the weekend was a speeding issue in Section 7 of pit road, one that caught up multiple drivers, including Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott.

How did such high-profile drivers get caught up on such a seemingly simple thing with just laps to go?

Well, according to Denny Hamlin, the track at Pocono is a little unique in terms of how pit road is laid out. There are many more markers for speed checks than at most other tracks, which can cause drivers to have to adjust based on how NASCAR’s speed checks are registering.

“But they’re all up and down, like you could run the same exact speed, same RPM, put your car on cruise control, and it’s going to read, let’s just say the speed limit, let’s pretend it was 45 miles per hour,” Hamlin explained on the Actions Detrimental podcast. “It would read 43.5 in one section, 43.7 in another, 44.1, 43.5. Like it’s just so up and down and it’s weird that that’s the case on a straight pit road.

“Usually it’s really consistent, but Pocono for whatever reason has a lot of variance in their sections. So it certainly caught the field off-guard there when everyone was speeding there in Section 7, which was a very small section.”

It was an issue that was apparent earlier in the day, when the drivers went through their standard pre-race roll through the track. Some 33 drivers were flagged for speeding during the roll-through.

Hamlin was among the drivers that noted that and made sure to tinker with the plan.

“We made adjustments on the 11 car all day to accommodate that so we didn’t get busted by it,” Hamlin said. “But yeah, it seemed like, I was amazed that there weren’t more speeding penalties in Section 7 throughout the day, because everyone had sped. So it was crazy for me to believe that, really, everyone made adjustments? That fine-tune of adjustments before we went racing? And they did until it seemed like the very end when everyone got busted.”

The speeding penalties at Pocono drastically altered the day for Larson and Elliott, as well as two others. Larson went from potentially leading off pit road to the back of the pack.

With such a high-profile issue, could NASCAR take a closer look at Pocono’s setup going forward?

“I think they’ll probably re-evaluate it, my guess is,” Hamlin said. “Because obviously that throws up a red flag to them that, OK, something’s probably out of whack. We didn’t have 33 cars just miss it, that doesn’t make any sense. And it doesn’t make sense just because of the way it all worked out. I think that they just need to recalibrate it, then when we go back there and do our roll we’ll kind of see where we’re at.”