NASCAR pit road shock for van Gisbergen

The Supercars superstar will make his Cup Series debut in Chicago this weekend in a one-off start as part of the Project91 programme at Trackhouse Racing..

He has been in the States since last week preparing, taking in the Nashville race before undergoing a brief test on the Charlotte Roval.

Since then he has been busy using simulator work to continue his preparation before diving into the deep end of the top tier of NASCAR on Saturday (local time).

From the preparations so far, one thing has caught van Gisbergen’s attention – and that’s pit road.

Supercars are fitted with a pit lane speed limiter which means drivers simply need to slow the car sufficiently by the control line and then activate the limiter. The ECU then takes care of limiting the speed of the car.

Van Gisbergen is now faced with the manual speed limiting used in NASCAR, something he admits has been tricky to get a handle on as he looks for a solution that isn’t too conservative, but remains manageable for a newcomer.

“Obviously they don’t have any speed limiter,” van Gisbergen said of his limited NASCAR running so far.

“So when you go to a certain speed, the dash changes to the shift lights of what rev target they’re going for. And then you basically drive to an amount of revs and it’s in whatever increments you set it to.

“They have a few different types of pages if the speed changes. During the race, I saw at Nashville, they do a warm up lap where you go through the pits and they tell you, every segment, what speed you were doing. And then the team has the ability to tell you to change to what dash you want to adjust your lights.

“For me it’s completely different. Normally you just come in and put your foot to a certain throttle percentage and the pit limiter does its thing.

“[IN NASCAR] you’ve got to come in and drive to the lights. Kimi [Raikkonen] had a setting that was x amount of revs, it was quite a wide range to be easy. And I found that quite easy, which is obviously a bit conservative. So I thought, okay, I’ll try that what the race guys do. But I really struggled.

“Like, it was so hard to hold a speed and then when you let off the throttle to adjust, you’d get a bit of whiplash in the drivetrain and the revs would go everywhere. It’s so difficult.

“I’ve sort of settled on a middle ground. But of course you’re driving looking at the dash, not at what’s ahead of you. So that’s another skill again.”

Another pit road challenge for van Gisbergen is spotting his box, given crew members only jump over the wall when the car is on its final approach.

In Supercars each team is garaged in the same spot for each race which means drivers always know where to stop.

The process is further eased by having pit members out on the apron, similar to Formula 1.

“Spotting your box is gonna be difficult,” said van Gisbergen of Chicago.

“They count you in and then when you get within one box all the guys jump out. The first time that happened, practicing at the shop, I just completely froze and thought I was gonna hit someone. It was very, very difficult.

“And then those [pit crew] guys, like, they have their own department of the race team. They’re all athletes in their own right. They train every day, stop every day. They’re pretty fit looking dudes, they were very skilled at what they did.

“It was pretty impressive to see how that side of thing works.”