How JHR and VeeKay turned pitstops from a weakness into a weapon

The Juncos Hollinger Racing team has made its presence felt on pit lane in 2026 with the No. 76 Chevy driven by Rinus VeeKay.

Leaving last season, the No. 76 entry was ranked in the bottom half of the field – 16th out of 27 full-time entries – in the Firestone Pit Stop Performance Award Rankings, which assigns points to each car at every race for their average time spent on pit lane.

Leaving the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, the No. 76 Chevy was second-best in the race and, crucially, second-best for the season to date, trailing only the No. 9 Chip Ganassi Racing Honda of Scott Dixon. The year-to-year leap of 14 positions is the largest in the field.

Through IndyCar’s timing and scoring system, the transponder on every car registers the moment when it crosses the pit-in timing stripe and the pit-out stripe, and with that cumulative time recorded, each visit to pit lane is added and then divided by the number of stops to generate the driver and team’s average pit stop duration.

At Long Beach, for example, Dixon and the No. 9 crew stopped twice and averaged 40.1980s from entry to exit, while VeeKay and the No. 76 crew made three stops and averaged 40.3573s. With the exception of Phoenix, where an early crash required a long stop for repairs, the Dutchman and his JHR team have been fast and consistent when it’s time to visit pit lane.

“It's a combination of four components,” team principal Dave O’Neill told RACER. “One being the driver, which makes a big difference with how the timing is done from pit entry to pit exit and how they get in and stop and get out. So that's one component. Then you have to be consistent from the start of the weekend to the end of the weekend. And then that that starts off with the practice we do in the factory.

“The staff don't just prep the cars every morning. They put in their shift an hour or two in the morning in the gym, and we work on certain areas of the body so we can get repeatability. And then, of course, the other thing we do is we practice pit stops at four o'clock every day with both crews and the drivers tend to come in and take part in the practice as well. So we have continuity there, which follows into the real stuff.”

O’Neill has relied on JHR’s internal staff to make the necessary improvements to move its lead car forward in the pit stop rankings. The sister No. 77 Chevy driven by Sting Ray Robb, which ended last season in 24th and currently sits 21st, is ripe for a sizable improvement of its own.

“We’ve also upgraded some of the equipment and have talked about it, visualized it, recorded it, gone over it again and again and again,” O’Neill said. “And the two guys in the shop spearheading it are Mike Witson, who's the chief mechanic, and Tom Edwards, the team manager. We have to be the best at what we do as a team, which is to prepare ourselves for the eventuality of when we are in a battle with someone and they have to think, ‘Okay, it is JHR. They're not the old tuggers at the back. They'll put up a good fight, and we have to work our strategy around it.’”

As happy as O’Neill might be with the big turnaround on pit lane, there’s no satisfaction to find in sitting behind Dixon’s No. 9 crew.

“We work as hard as we can, and we're going to carry on because P2 is still first of the losers,” he said. “So we want that P1 spot, and we'll carry on working throughout the year to get that.”