The Team Penske No. 12 pit crew had a really competitive afternoon on Sunday at Martinsville.
While a generally uneventful race typically would not be a newsworthy development, it is right now because the group that works alongside driver Ryan Blaney has been a work-in-progress this year.
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It has objectively been a rough month and a half until this past weekend where their combined team effort resulted in a sixth place finish. The pit crew also delivered stops that kept them in the mix all afternoon.
Bozi Tatarevic, under the Motorsport.com banner, asked Blaney on Saturday if there had been any consideration of swapping out jackman Landon Honeycutt but the driver wasn’t willing to go that far.
“I’m not going to call out Landon,” Blaney said. “I think there’s been some other things that have contributed to maybe it looking like he’s struggled a little bit. He is green and he is a little new so there are some things he’s got to clean up.
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“I do think from an equipment and choreography side, that can improve to. Landon is still with us this weekend and we’re going to let him keep growing and learning and hopefully, from a personnel and equipment standpoint, we can kind of clean that up and find better ways to do things.”
Team Penske vice president of competition Travis Geisler echoed those sentiments on Monday during a SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Appearance too. Geisler said the No. 12 group, holistically, is doing a good job this season.
“We’ve always continued to tweak things and try to make things better,” Geisler said on the air. “And I think we just kind of ran into a spot where we got bit by something a couple times and needed to take a step back and look at all the pieces involved and try to decide how to move forward.
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“I think the personnel that we have involved there are awesome. I mean, that group is lights out when they’re on. I think there’s some things we need to do better from the team side of things to make their jobs a little easier.
“There’s obviously some things they need to work on too. You know, the pit road dance … there’s very few teams having perfect days week-in and week-out. It’s super difficult.”
Geisler said their issues have been highlighted more than other teams’ similar struggles because they are running in the top-5 when it happens. But all told, right now, there’s no impending changes because this is a crew they have developed from scratch.
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“The way the pit world is going these days, you have to develop your people,” Geisler said. “With the hiring of crews, it’s gotten really difficult in how everyone gets integrated into the culture, and how it’s different than back in the day when it was just a bunch of road crew and mechanics going over the wall.
“But like I said, we have a great group of guys going over the wall over there, and we’ve had success with them and they are very capable of getting the job done.”
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