Tricky Weather at the Pocono Triangle

 

Sorry for the delay this week, folks.  First the Pocono rain pushed the race back to Monday.  It was painful to leave for work that morning, but the DVR was set.  Once the green flag dropped, I avoided all forms of news and social media.  Racing home from work (see what I did there?), I attempted to turn on my television.  But Time Warner Cable decided that the middle of the race would be a good time for an outage of cable television AND internet service, an outage that lasted for 11 hours.  Thankfully I was able to find and record a rebroadcast of the race.  Now that I have finally gotten to see the race and get caught up on social media, here I am!

Weather at Pocono can be as tricky as the triangular track, but this time around it seemed to be particularly troublesome.  Various combinations of rain and fog resulted in delays and curtailments of practice as well as the race itself.  The first practice lasted for a grand total of eight minutes, enough time for 70% of the cars to put down a lap or two.  Out of that minimal bit of practice, Carl managed to snag the fastest speed.  That did not tell us much, but it did tell us that they unloaded with a good setup.

The weather did allow for a complete qualifying session, and Carl made it through all three segments, claiming the 5th spot on the starting grid.  And then in the final practice, he was 12th fastest.

During the race, he ran between 2nd and 13th place.  Most of the time was spent in the back half of the top ten, from 5th to 9th.  He lost spots on a couple of shaky restarts, but both the driver and the pit crew avoided costly pit road mistakes this weekend.  And although there were quite a number of crashes during the race, those mercifully avoided him, too.  After a couple of races with poor results, he got himself back into the top ten with an 8th place finish.  He maintained the 3rd spot on the Chase grid and moved up one spot in the drivers' standings to sit in 4th.