Can’t find good video yet (the race ended just minutes ago), but DDAMN! that was scary as fuck! I was elated when I saw all those crew members give the thumbs up! And then my ddamn jaw ddamn near hit the ddamn floor when I saw Austin Dillon walking away!
I hope the fans are all okay as well; that would make the safety record on this crash just about perfect and I can’t say it enough: that was scary as fuck!
Deadspin has it up. It’s a hell of a wreck alright.
And full credit to whoever built that catch fence.
I fell asleep in the middle of race and have only seen the replays. As near as I can tell, Dillon got more flight time than the Wright brothers.
An I’ll second kudos to the engineers who designed the safety devices on the track and in the cars. Without them, we’d be talking about the dead driver and 200+ dead and injured fans from the car flying into the stands.
Speaking of the spectators, jalopnik has a video from the stands where the wreck occured.
Time for NASCAR to go into chickens with their heads cut off mode in another attempt to fix this problem - because they did such a good job after pretty much the same thing happened to Carl Edwards at Talladega in 2009.
“It’s the demon restrictor plates, I tells ya! Get rid of 'em!” Sure, and then we can talk about how a driver died after “the big one” caused by the speeds becoming far too fast.
That’s at least third car launched toward the stands at Daytona or Talledega in the past several years ( I believe Carl Edwards and Kyle Larsen also have taken that particular ride). As horrifying as the crash looked, the immense strength and impact-absorbing design of the driver’s ‘cage’ was well displayed. The lengthy, parts-shedding flight was probably less traumatic to the driver than the remains of Dillon’s car getting pinballed at high speed by the 2 car just about the time it came to rest.
OTOH, Dillon’s car came perilously close to getting though the fence. I’m not sure what NASCAR can do about these late-race pileups at the 'Plate tracks (they’ve significantly reduced horsepower and built in all kinds of doodads to reduce the tendency of the cars to go airborne in recent years), but IMO someone’s going to get killed pretty soon.
I brought this up before, and now’s as good a time as any to ask it again: How is it possible to get into a massive wreck and spin and spin and roll and spin and roll and roll and roll and roll and roll…and NOT GET THE TEENSIEST BIT DIZZY??
I mean, that they don’t get a scratch is to be expected at this point (and I’m very happy for that), but how is it the the guy can just step out and casually walk away in a straight line? If that’s me, the best case scenario would probably be throwing up only once and still being able to move my eyes somewhat.
Actually, the most horrific part of the accident was when the car dug into the fence, caught the support pole, and went from 185 to 0 almost immediately. The impact force of Keselowski was light in comparison.
As for late-race packs resulting in accidents, they need to stop manufacturing G-W-C finishes. If you watch the races weekly as I do you’ll notice that there are frequently “debris” cautions that serve to make the end of the race exciting. When you do that at Daytona or Talladega you’re setting up potential disaster. But that’s the appeal, isn’t it? Plate racing scares the drivers and has the potential for doom every time they get up to speed, yet fans love it because it’s simultaneously dangerous and skillful.
Would that really make a difference? It seems to me (not just this race, but all restrictor-plate races) that the cars are in a pack all the time anyway. I suppose if they got rid of the green-white-checkered rule, each race could only end in one accident, instead of two (or more). That’s not a great solution. A better one would remove the conditions that lead to any huge accidents.
You will note the car hit the catch fence (and the pole(s)) rightside up, relatively speaking. Had the car impacted the catch fence upside down, relatively speaking, Austin Dillon might not have made it out alive.
It does make a difference, because over the course of a race the field stretches out a bit, with the leaders frequently going single-file while the rest are no more than two-wide.
A G-W-C packs everybody together and creates as many as 4 lines. 4-wide with everybody going for the win? It’s a recipe for disaster, as it was in this race.
There’s no way to remove the conditions for huge accidents. You either get Big Ones or you get not-quite-so-Big Ones at 225 miles per hour. As a fan I’d rather have the 20-car pileups instead of a car in the grandstands. The alternative is to stop running the superspeedways and stick to the cookie-cutter tracks, which is something nobody wants, not to mention that without Daytona nobody cares anymore. That’s where it all started.
Some of that is surely intentional, though, based on the situation in the race. Some drivers will deliberately stay in the back for most of the race to avoid accidents, knowing that they’ll have just as good a chance to work their way toward the lead when it matters. Those not deliberately staying back will take risks at the end of the race that they wouldn’t at the beginning. Even without a caution flag, I would expect a race to tighten up the final few laps, and present the same conditions that lead to these types of accidents.
It doesn’t usually work that way. The single-file cars up front run away from the pack, and once the draft is lost it isn’t easily regained. In other words, barring a caution if you’re in the back you’ll finish there.