NASCAR extends practice time for Pennzoil 400

He has never been one to walk softly during a NASCAR race weekend. But let the record show that Kyle Busch’s big stick still carries a lot of weight.

The two-time Cup Series champion from Las Vegas complained before last week’s race at Auto Club Speedway in California that 15 minutes of practice wasn’t nearly enough time to work out the kinks in a new racecar. NASCAR apparently listened.

Cup Series practice has been lengthened from 15 minutes to 35 on Saturday before 11:15 a.m. group qualifying for Sunday’s Pennzoil 400. Instead of practice being split into two groups of the new Next Gen cars, everybody will hit the track at the same time.

“I think that’s a plus,” Busch said during a telephone chat from Phoenix on Thursday, where his 6-year-old son, Brexton, was driving in dirt track races.

“Everybody’s gonna be on pit road (at the same time), so 36, 40 cars, whatever, rolling out on the racetrack right away is gonna be kind of a cluster. But we’ll all get out there as much as we can and try to get in as many laps as we can.”

With qualifying immediately following the practice session and NASCAR limiting adjustments on pit road, Busch says there’s only so much that can be done.

“The bigger thing about my discussions last week was just the inability to work on the car after practice,” he said.

Better come prepared

With NASCAR having introduced the radically redesigned Next Gen car for this season, practice time has become even more essential.

“So it’s still a work in progress but we’re making gains on it,” Busch said.

NASCAR had eliminated practice and qualifying during the spread of COVID-19 when the cars were lined up based on how they finished the race before. Teams that missed on their setups were forced to use part of the race as a de facto practice session and fine-tune their cars during pit stops.

Although Busch wasn’t the only one who asked for more practice time, the change was made for this week’s race only because it had minimal impact on the weekend schedule.

“COVID will have forever changed the landscape of how our sport functions,” said former Cup Series and Pennzoil 400 champion Kevin Harvick. “The one thing I think all the team owners and the sport in general realize is the amount of people that are necessary, the amount of time on the track that is necessary, is a lot less than what it was pre-COVID.”

Like Busch, Harvick said he prefers as much practice time as he can get. If you don’t hit on the setup before arriving at the track, it could make for a long weekend, he said.

“This is a new process as we go straight into practice, straight into qualifying, straight into impound. The amount of work that needs to be done going to the racetrack with setups is going to be much more important than what it was in the past,” said the veteran driver.

“There’s just not a lot you can do once you hit pit road.”

Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.