NSCS: Dave Rogers Says Monkey is Off Their Back with Martinsville Victory

Surrounded by new guys on the No. 11 team and kicking off a new driver/crew chief relationship this season, Denny Hamlin and Dave Rogers have had a semi-rough start to the season with some struggles. However, on Sunday at Martinsville, they were able to put the pieces together and score the victory. For Rogers, it simply means that the No. 11 FedEx team has the monkey off of their back early in the year, and gives them a good opportunity to now go into the off-weekend enjoying the win, and working at doing better.

The victory didn’t come easy, though, as the team had some struggles on pit road that resulted in Hamlin losing spots each time he headed down. Rogers says that’s the result of “a perfect storm on pit road”.

“We have one of our pit crew members is injured.  He’s out,” he stated. “Last year the 11 pit crew was the fastest on pit road every week. We had a guy step in.  He’s doing a great job, but you just can’t put six guys together and expect them to be the best. It takes time to gel.  There may be some rust in the pit crew there.  Our rear tire changer has got the flu.  He had three bags of IV before the race, half hour before the race he’s getting bags of IV.”

Beyond the injured pit crew member, Rogers took a risk and put Hamlin in the first stall coming on to pit road. His reasoning being, “We’ll try anything because I think he can carry this team”. However, rather than gain spots, it caused them to lose spots as Hamlin was having to dodge traffic once completing his stop. Looking back, Rogers realizes that he put them in a box and made some bad calls.

“We tried 43, it’s one of those things, hey, let’s try it, if it works out we’ll try it in the fall.  It didn’t work out,” he stated. “And then the one stop we were leading the race, we just got to the lead and usually you pick up the pace car and you roll around a lap and then they open pit road, but for whatever reason race control opened pit road quicker than I expected anyways, and next thing you know we’re in our pit box.”

Though light of the issues, Rogers was left pleased, centering around how his driver handled it and showed “great leadership characteristics” by not yelling or saying anything derogatory. Instead, Hamlin just told the team that they had to pick it up and he would work to get it back on track.

“It was a perfect storm for a bad day on pit road, but at the end, everybody picked it up, and we came out with a victory,” Rogers said. “We’ve got some room for improvement and a Martinsville clock, so a good day.”