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Kyle Busch won the NASCAR Cup Series’ GEICO 500 on Sunday (April 23) under caution as the field wrecked behind him at Talladega Superspeedway. That ended another crash-filled weekend at the sport’s largest tri-oval, one that saw two Xfinity Series flips and then a major wreck in the Cup event during NASCAR Overtime.
Still, in between all the incidents, Talladega provided some exciting racing along with two surprise winners. Frontstretch’s Adam Cheek and Vito Pugliese discuss whether the racetrack could serve as the rebound moment NASCAR needed after a lackluster event at Martinsville Speedway led to mounting criticism over their less-than-stellar start to 2023.
Then, our dynamic duo takes a look at the seriousness of some of the carnage we saw. Should Kyle Larson’s roll cage deformity spur NASCAR into action, doing further Next Gen tweaking in the name of driver safety?
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About the author
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of VCU, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and also hosts the "Adam Cheek's Sports Week" podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.
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I was pretty sure I’d stayed awake for the whole thing.
But I must have dozed off & missed the “exciting” racing.
What lap was that on?
That was when the 27 was on the track! The rest was just following the script from the network morning meeting when they decide who and what they will show and talk about during their coverage of the product.
Racing is, by definition, a contest of speed, and the one thing that never happened at any time for longer than a few seconds was a contest of speed.
There was endless stupidity of attempting to prevent another driver from passing by means of blocking, blithely referred to by the announcers as “managing the lanes,” and resulting in millions of dollars in damaged equipment and great risk of injury and death.
The announcers kept hyping the blocking and promising us that “things would get crazy” (meaning the crashing would start) very soon. Clint Bowyer even said, idiotically, that, “We want to see the big one, but we want to see everyone walk away.”
Clint said what the networks want, so they can fill their ads with the demo derbies.