NASCAR investigating failures of new pitguns after Atlanta

NASCAR decided to prevent teams from continuing a development war by introducing pitguns manufactured by Paoli, which also supplies the devices to Formula 1 and Supercars.

The pitguns have caused problems at both the first two Cup rounds of 2018.

At Atlanta on Sunday, race winner Kevin Harvick had to come back through from 19th after a problematic pitstop and reigning Cup champion Martin Truex Jr's recovery drive from the back of the grid was hampered by similar troubles.

A NASCAR spokesperson told Autosport the series was "working with the supplier and immediately looked at the reasoning so that it will be fixed as soon as possible".

NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer Steve O'Donnell admitted the problems were not unexpected.

"Obviously, we don't want to see failures with any part or piece," he told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

"We knew going in that this could potentially happen and the likelihood of it happening at some point during the season was fairly high.

"But we're going to have those conversations and get it right.

"It was an initiative that we worked closely with the teams on and never want to see a part or piece malfunction.

"We want it to be in the hands of the drivers and the race teams. That's something we obviously take very seriously and we'll head to Vegas to hopefully get that cleaned up."

Harvick's Stewart-Haas Racing crew chief Rodney Childers said that Paoli cannot be blamed for the problems because it had a short timeframe to produce the pitguns.

"There's no way I could sit up here and complain about anything they've done because I can't imagine taking that on during the winter, and what they did over a two-month span or a three-month span trying to get all that stuff ready for the teams," he said.

"My opinion is we're going to go through ups and downs and we need to go through them together and learn together, and [the issues] are part of it."

Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin said the theory behind the rule change makes sense.

"They [NASCAR] could control everything," he said.

"That's probably why - amongst the competition side of things - they don't want to fail because it's a bad luck thing.

"They want it [pitstops] to fail because they [the pitcrew] did a bad job. It's your own fault then."