Rinus VeeKay‘s near two-second lead before the final pit sequence looked to be insurmountable. After all, he had dominated the first two-thirds of Sunday’s (May 1) Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama at Barber Motorsports Park, the fourth race of the 2022 IndyCar Series season.
Before his second pit stop, the No. 21 Ed Carpenter Racing Chevrolet was up front for 57 laps, losing the lead only due to green flag pit stops. When the final round of pit stops concluded, however, the Dutch racer was back in third place behind eventual race winner Pato O’Ward and second place finisher Alex Palou.
How? VeeKay’s lead to O’Ward seemed to be secure before the final round of stops and Palou was back in fifth place before the pit stop sequence. The devil is in the details, and INDYCAR has a lot of details about this final round of pit stops.
INDYCAR has several scoring loops placed around each track and also in pit lane, with several intervals around different portions of each track. One such interval exists from the penultimate scoring loop to the pit lane entrance. INDYCAR’s timing and scoring only measures that interval when a car goes to pit lane, skipping the final scoring loop in turn 16 when the pit entry road splits from the track.
O’Ward’s time through that scoring loop for the final pit stop was 12.8009 seconds. VeeKay’s was a bit longer than that, at least longer than the 13.1526 seconds he registered for his first pit stop. Part of that could be because VeeKay may have been slightly held up by Jimmie Johnson before taking the pit access road ahead of O’Ward on lap 61.
Unfortunately, INDYCAR does not show what VeeKay’s time was through that interval for the second stop because it wasn’t his quickest time through there. The time was at least three and a half tenths of a second slower than O’Ward’s entry. Moving to pit road itself, O’Ward’s time on pit road was 29.6745 seconds, while VeeKay’s was 29.8323 seconds. That’s about…
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