LONG POND, Pa. – Regan Smith and Tommy Baldwin Racing played the strategy in the postponed Pennsylvania 400 at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway and even though it didn’t pay off with the race win, it paid off with the team’s second career top-five finish.
With weather threatening the 2.5-mile triangle for much of the early afternoon, the team elected to keep their driver out during a span of the final green flag pit stops. As the cycle neared its conclusion, the caution waved for limited visibility with Smith third on the race track.
After several laps at pace car speed, the field was brought down pit road where they went under a red flag condition. Adverse weather conditions eventually brought the race to its conclusion 22 laps from the finish with the team matching their career best finish in Sprint Cup competition. Dave Blaney scored the team’s first top-five run at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway in October 2012.
“It’s been a strange weekend really weather wise,” said Smith, driver of the No. 7 APC Chevrolet. “There were times yesterday (Sunday) I thought we were going to get to race and the track had like a pond underneath it apparently. I’m just proud of Tommy (Baldwin) and then the guys on the box for kind of realizing there was opportunity for a strategy play there.
“We have had a decent run today. We were a lot better than we were last time here. We have made a lot of gains with our race car and with our team. When you are a small team you’ve got to take those opportunities when you can. Fortunately, we were getting good enough fuel mileage to just keep trying to stretch it and have enough left for when the caution did come out.
“I don’t know that we could have predicted it would have been from fog. I think we were just trying to do what we could do to make sure we maintained as far up as we could and maybe lead a lap or something like that. That is what you’ve got to do sometimes.”
For Smith, the finish was a welcomed boost in a season full of frustration and disappointing finishes. Despite finishing a satisfying eighth in the season-opening Daytona 500, he hasn’t finished in the top-20 since leaving Monday’s performance a finish to savor in his first full Cup season since 2012.
“We’re building a small team and trying to make the next step and trying to climb a ladder, and that next step for us is just getting higher up on engineering support and trying to be more real time with the partners we have,” added Smith. “We work closely with ECR and RCR on stuff, but there’s a lot of stuff that we can’t afford to get. If this can perhaps bring in a company that can take us to that next level, we’ve got great partners on the car as it is, but if we can do something to take it to that next level, then it’s only going to increase our performance.
“Any good run is a big deal, and as I mentioned earlier, we’ve got I think we’ve got like 20 guys, 24 guys total on our team, and we were at a test at Watkins Glen last week, and I saw one team that had 24 engineers there, just to put it in perspective. If we take 10 guys to the racetrack, we’re leaving 10 at home essentially working on the race cars and trying to get ready, and that means that your people have to do a lot more and work a lot more hours and really grind it out.
“Just for the shop alone to be able to say, hey, we had a good day, and I know everybody is going to say it was fuel mileage, it was rain, it was this, it was that. We had a good day, we stayed on the lead lap, did what we had to do, and we made some huge improvements to our race car from the last time we were at Pocono, and that’s the things I look at. I say, okay we were way more competitive today than we were two months ago, and that’s a gain.”
In a sport where momentum is everything, Smith, a relatively solid road course racer takes some much-welcomed momentum to Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International looking for their third top-10 finish of the season in next Sunday’s Cheez-It 355 at the Glen. In five starts, he has a best finish of ninth in 2012.
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01
