And he says it’s not even true.
As the JGR team of Denny Hamlin consistently beat the Stewart-Haas Racing team of Kevin Harvick off pit road Sunday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Harvick crew chief Rodney Childers told Harvick that JGR had some new air guns they were using.
Lepp, the JGR athletic director who oversees the pit crews, swears that these are the guns that they have been using all year to loosen and tighten lugnuts during a pit stop. He said the team typically has some pit stops under 12 seconds and others over 12 seconds but Sunday whipped off all pit stops under 12 seconds.
With JGR not having been in contention to win as many races this year, it just became noticeable Sunday with Hamlin and Harvick battling for the lead. Lepp said he believes it was just Childers trying to calm down his driver.
“There wasn’t anything new or anything,” Lepp said in a phone interview Tuesday with the Sporting News. “It was an attempt to calm his driver down. … (Like the cars), it’s the same thing with these guys, you still have to have good athletes.
“But there’s nothing that we brought to Atlanta that we haven’t been bringing. The difference is we were running up front. When you go from 12th to ninth, you’re not going to be feature (on TV).”
All teams get data on the speed over everyone’s pit stop, and Lepp said the Hamlin team had a better than average night and even Harvick’s team had one of its best night. Lepp said the last two Atlanta stalls being asphalt instead of concrete (they were added when the track added pit stalls several years ago) might have been a disadvantage.
But what about the sound of the guns? The guns might sound different depending on the tire changer, Lepp said. Each of the major teams make their own guns, which must be air-powered, and each tire changer is responsible for determining how fast they go.
Lepp said the team of Matt Kenseth had some pit stops within thousandths of a second to Hamlin’s crew, and their guns would sound totally different.
“They all sound different and the reason they do is the reason you vent the air out of them,” Lepp said. “One of the ways to get the guns to run faster is to run higher air pressure. … It’s usually the tire changer’s preference to run higher air pressures.
“Some guys like controlling their gun and they run lower air pressures.”
The only rule on air guns dictates that they must be NASCAR approved, air-powered and can only do one lugnut at a time. A NASCAR spokesman said Tuesday that it has “no issue whatsoever” with the air guns that JGR is using.
Lepp said he did not think JGR has spent a million dollars on air guns, as has been bantered around on social media.
“I can’t imagine it costing that much money when you consider how simple these things are,” Lepp said.
He said JGR makes sure they have the best equipment possible, from shoes to uniforms to air guns.
“It’s very humorous,” Lepp said. “When it gets out on the edge some of the people are saying it’s cheating? That’s ridiculous. I had to actually check to see if we brought something special and the guys said it was the same thing they’ve been bringing all year.
“It’s control versus speed (with the air pressures). These guys are doing it all the time. They’ll (change it) and have a great practice and then take it to the track and they suck in that race and they’ll go back to the other air pressure."
