Hendrick Motorsports director of competition, Jeff Andrews says all four cars had similar issues in pre-qualifying inspection at Auto Club
The drivers who failed pre-qualfying inspection: Denny Hamlin; Clint Bowyer; Aric Almirola; Alex Bowman; William Byron; Daniel Suarez; Chase Elliott; AJ Allmendinger; Jimmie Johnson; Kasey Kahne; Timmy Hill; Ross Chastain; Cole Whitt;
Hendrick Motorsports added 30% to the list above. Every Hendrick Motorsports car failed to make it to the track to turn a single qualifying lap.
“Hopefully, the upside is we’ll get to pass a bunch of cars. The downside is I felt like we had a really good race car. We only made one qualifying run in practice and we were 10th,” Alex Bowman told Fox Sports yesterday on his walk to the garage as the checkered flag dropped on round 1 of knockout qualifying.
He wasn’t the only Hendrick Motorsports driver to take that walk. In fact, all 4 Hendrick machines were still in the tech line as round 1 concluded.
Did all four Hendrick Motorsports cars suffer the same problems with inspection?
“They’re all similar, in the same area of the car. We gotta go back, obviously internally and talk with NASCAR. We felt like we were making changes in the area affected,” Hendrick Motorsports director of Competition, Jeff Andrews told Fox Sports.
“Just we were not seeing the results when we went back through.”
For 2018, NASCAR has launched the OSS inspection. Some teams have made the investment to purchase a system of their own for testing purpose in the shop. Hendrick Motorsports is not one of those teams.
“I don’t think it’s related. We have equipment in the shop to scan our cars that we feel is very accurate and we’ve had good results with, up until this point.”
“Obviously, there was more than just our 4 cars. We need to work with NASCAR on it. I know they don’t want to see this either. We have to figure out a solution going forward.”
What areas did the Hendrick Motorsports machine fail the inspection?
“It’s in the rear deck lid area. That’s the general area where we were working on and making changes,” Jeff Andrews concludes.
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