HAMPTON, Ga. — An usually high number of cars were busted for speeding in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, and one claimed the best car of the race.
Kevin Harvick dominated the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500, but was busted for speeding on pit road during the final caution of the race and wound up finishing ninth.
“It’s my own doing today. I really didn’t think I was even close on pit lane. It gets to bouncing around, I thought I was being conservative, apparently I wasn’t,” Harvick said.
There were two drivers busted for speeding twice.
Matt Kenseth brought his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota to a third-place finish at Atlanta after being busted twice for speeding on pit road. His two were among the 13 speeding penalties issued to 11 different drivers in the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500.
“We just sped on pit road there some – all our lights were right, so I don’t know,” Kenseth said. “We must have – something happened there and that got us behind. Then we were trying to get caught up and it happened again, so we just had to forgot about our indications, just go real slow down pit road and finally came back from it all.”
Jimmie Johnson finished 19th after two speeding penalties on the day.
“Tough day with two speeding penalties. We will have to look at our math and figure out what was going on there,” Johnson said. “The first one, I’m sure I could have gotten popped. The second one I made sure I didn’t get popped again and I still got in trouble. So, we might have had something off on our end.”
Other drivers busted included Dale Earnhardt Jr., Gray Gaulding, Joey Logano, Clint Bowyer, AJ Allmendinger, Martin Truex Jr., Chase Elliott and Derrike Cope.
This was the first race at the Hampton, Georgia race track since NASCAR expanded the number of timing lines on pit road last season. It significantly increased the number of speeding penalties called at Atlanta by 1300 percent, 13 this season compared to one* last season.
*This article has been corrected to show the 2016 Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 had one speeding penalty, rather than zero as originally reported.
