Recent incidents show life in the pits is perilous.....
On Sunday, Kyle Busch collided with DJ Edwards, the rear tire changer on the No. 98 Yates Racing Ford, while exiting his pit during the competition caution on Lap 45. On Lap 153, Busch ran into the side of the No. 33 Chevrolet that was pitting two stalls away and flipped the team's jackman, Bill Ferguson, over the right front end of his hood and onto pit road. Ferguson's jack flew into the No. 78’s pitbox — one stall ahead.
I jumped in the air to try and take the load off my legs. Kyle's car hit me and took my legs out. I landed in front of Clint's car — on the other side of Kyle — while my jack landed in the next pit stall. I was a little banged up from it, but it could have been a lot worse.”
Ferguson, a seven-year veteran crewman, was lucky to escape with a swollen knee and sore shoulder and wrist. He added that a couple of Busch's team members apologized after the incident, but he's yet to hear from the driver or crew chief Steve Addington.
Busch called the situation “a bad deal.”
“All of a sudden the guys scattered into the box and I had to pick my way through,” Busch said. “I couldn't stop or back up. Time on pit road is too precious.
>>>>>>>”It's dangerous on pit road. But that's why the guys wear firesuits and helmets.”
NASCAR officials are assigned to each pit box to monitor everything from how the car lines up to whether all five lugnuts are on the wheel securely. Certainly observing drivers maneuvers around pit crews could be a manageable addition to the list.
“It's dangerous enough for those guys out there,” Bowyer said. “In that situation he needed to let (Ferguson) get out of the way, bump him, whatever, not just completely not check up. It was a bad situation. It was the perfect recipe for a disaster. But when you have a pit crew member on foot — right in front of you — he doesn't have a roll cage around him. You can't run him over.
“You have to use good judgment. (Crews) have to use good judgment not to jump out in front of us racecar drivers and we have to use good judgment and not run them over. It's going to cost you on pit road. It is. But you can't hurt a guy. If (Busch) had killed that guy, he would have really wished he hadn't done that.”
NASCAR lists 36 possible pit road violations but there is no penalty for running into a pit crew member.