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.
Not to quote the late Jackie Gleason but Daytona & Talladega have
problems that if not corrected someone will run out of luck and be
mangled or killed in one of the pileup wrecks the frequent those
races.
I had to laugh at the clowns in the booth. They heaped tons of praise on NASCAR for the aero changes made and how well they “worked” on McDowell’s car, when it appeared that being rung up on the 22 was what kept it from going fully airborne. And then just a few laps later Berry had his scary crash and they had to walk back all their praise and proclamations about NASCAR’s updates.
What is going on with NASCAR’s AMR crew? AMR’s Indycar crews reach a car as soon as it stops, but it takes them forever in NASCAR. Last week an Xfinity car hit the wall hard, burst into flames and slid to a stop. The driver climbed out, walked to front of the car, took his helmet off and sat on the track as cars went by, before anyone got to him. I’d DVR’d the race, it took 55 seconds from when the car stopped till someone got to him, a driver who looked at minimum to have the wind knocked out of him. Berry’s flip was just as bad. The AMR crew seemed to stand around trying to figure out what to do, while in Indycar they’d have had the car back on it’s wheels and the driver out before the NASCAR crew figured out how to hook the car up. Don’t they practice these things?
Matthew is right above, but at least drivers accept this risk. What worries me is someday the fence won’t hold and a 3500 pound Cup car is going to end up in the stands or infield at Daytona, Talladega, Michigan or Atlanta.
I noticed that too. And what happened to the networks showing the driver get out of the car after a wreck so that everyone can see he is ok. Are we just immune to the fact that drivers are rarely injured now or is this more a Nascar edict that they want them to discuss something else to take the focus off the wreck. Makes you wonder.
And by the way, its Daytona is called a speedway not a raceway.