DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – With Harrison Burton and Wood Brothers Racing grabbing headlines for Burton’s first NASCAR Cup Series win and WBR’s 100th at Daytona International Speedway, a more sinister storyline emerged under the lights on Saturday night, Aug. 24.
After the previous week’s race at Michigan International Speedway, NASCAR implemented a new aero fin on the right side of the back window of Cup cars. This action was taken as a direct result of Corey LaJoie‘s flip the previous week.
In theory, the aerodynamic properties of the fin were supposed to keep the cars on the ground in the same sort of scenario that LaJoie was in.
They did not accomplish that goal.
Several drivers caught air during the Coke Zero Sugar 400, with one crash sucking the air out of an energized Daytona International Raceway. Josh Berry‘s flip during the closing stages of the race was the worst look, but Michael McDowell also went airborne during the race in a situation where both cars should have been more planted.
Berry was the only one that landed on his roof, but if the idea is to keep the cars from lifting up off the ground, that was nowhere close to accomplished.
After that same crash that ended his day, McDowell shared his experience during the fiasco.
“I don’t know what it looked like,” McDowell said. “I closed my eyes. Any time you get turned in front of the field while leading it, you know somebody is going to hit you. There’s no way you’re getting out of it.”
McDowell’s commented on the aero addition and its aftereffects, or lack thereof.
“The fin has been kind of tried and tested to help (against) the lift off, so I don’t feel like that would be (the reason we’re flipping),” he said. “They’ll study it and look at it. I mean, it’s so hard to plan for every situation. The easiest thing to do is just slow us down, right? And as the drivers, we don’t really want that because it changes the feel of the race. … I’m sure they’ll look at all the options.”
Meanwhile, McDowell’s teammate at Front Row Motorsports, Todd Gilliland, had his own concerns about the flipping issue from the unique perspective of one of the tallest drivers on the grid.
“(The flipping) is obviously not what we want,” he said. “It’s always something I worry about too, being one of the taller guys. I never want to be upside down, so that’s definitely unfortunate. The work never stops, though, right?”
Berry’s flip is what captivated the crowd the most, as he wound up sliding on his roof on the backstretch before making a hard impact into the inside-wall SAFER barrier. After medics cleared him from the wreckage, he waved to the crowd and gave a thumbs up, a welcome sight that came after fans in attendance waited with bated breath.
“Unfortunately, we just got turned around, and the car lifted up and slid on its roof,” Berry said. “The paving job, I think, did its job compared to what we saw last year. I mean, I just slid on my roof into the wall. … It was wild, but I don’t think it was near as bad as what we saw last year.”
Berry does make a great point. Last year, if he were to flip in that exact spot, the Ryan Preece crash would have been replayed. However, what about on tracks that don’t have those kind of precautions put in place, where walls are much closer together and there’s not as much room to slide and deaden the impact into a wall?
Make no mistake about it: no one was hurt in the airborne wrecks at Daytona, and that’s a blessing.
But if the cars continue to flip at this rate and at these speeds, it might only be a matter of time before someone does get hurt, and that’s a reality that the NASCAR world does not want to live in.
Tanner Marlar is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated’s OnSI Network, a contributor for TopSpeed.com, an AP Wire reporter, an award-winning sports columnist and talk show host and master's student at Mississippi State University. Soon, Tanner will be pursuing a PhD. in Mass Media Studies. Tanner began working with Frontstretch as an Xfinity Series columnist in 2022.