CORONADO, Calif. — Everything that could have possibly gone wrong for Corey Day during NASCAR’s inaugural Naval Base Coronado weekend, did.
After starting in the rear of the field with a blank white backup car, upending a manhole cover that heavily damaged his front end, a speeding penalty and being spun not once, but twice, an extremely minute amount of people thought Day could possibly have fought back to the front of the field.
Well, everyone except Day, who somehow, someway, did come back to finish with a top 10 on Naval Base Coronado.
“Yeah, pretty unbelievable there,” Day told Frontstretch. “We’re close to the top five there too. Man, this team is unbelievable. I mean, manhole cover through the radiator and the oil cooler, pit penalty, get turned, have damage, fix it, bad pit stop, fix it and get back out all good. I mean, it’s unbelievable.
“This is a day I’ll remember for a lot of reasons.”
On June 19, Day’s practice run went about as poorly as possible when he spun his No. 17 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet and slapped the wall during the session. The impact was hard enough to where the team couldn’t repair it and instead switched to a backup car.
His qualifying run went almost as bad. Day put up a time of 2:20.080, a full six seconds of the pace of polesitter Brent Crews and only 31st fastest overall.
Once the green flag waved, it got even worse. Day saw his series of unfortunate events become even more miraculous when an unsealed manhole cover on the new street circuit upended itself and was lodged in the front end of his car. The HMS team took him to the garage while NASCAR repaired the track.
“I figured it was something like [a manhole cover],” Day said. “I saw it come flying across the track just right like diagonal right into me and, at first, I thought it went under the car and cut a tire, and then I realized about halfway back to pit road, this might be oil here.”
In a highly unusual twist, NASCAR allowed Day’s team to repair the car under the red flag. Once he came out of the garage, the officials even let him get his four laps back while the sanctioning body slowly paced the field under caution.
Even adding to his early drama, Day had a near miss with a safety truck going backward while running his laps back.
“Thanks to NASCAR for letting us fix it,” Day continued. “That was, I think, the right decision by them being that it was completely out of anyone’s control.”
Once the race resumed, the dirt track star continued on the lead lap and tried to gain track position through strategy when flipping the stage.
Yet that even fell through. Day was caught speeding during his stop at the end of stage one.
“Yeah, speeding penalty bad on my part,” Day admitted. “Road-course gears are a lot taller than normal, so I’m not used to running pit road lights at that low of RPM, and I was more listening to it than looking at my [tachometer]. So that was on me.”
The cherry on top? Day even got spun not once, but twice on track while trying to get through the field. The first was a run-in with Dean Thompson near the middle of the race.
After some decent strategy, speed and some high attrition taking out much of the competition, however, Day actually made some ground. With only 14 laps remaining, he actually cracked the top 10 for the first time all weekend.
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With hope of a possible top five in the future, Day had one more obstacle to overcome with the face of fellow Chevrolet driver Parker Retzlaff. Retzlaff, a driver for Viking Motorsports, was racing hard with Day when his brakes started failing him.
“He got into me, and then I just struggling with brakes and just got him back and then kind of turned him around,” Retzlaff told Frontstretch. “I told him I was very sorry. They’ve had a really bad weekend overall, and I didn’t mean to make it worse.”
Thankfully for Day, however, he was able to turn his car around and stop the loss of position to continue racing in the top 10. There, he barely finished the weekend from hell with a 10th-place result.
“It was one hell of a race, for sure,” Day said.
Dalton Hopkins began writing for Frontstretch in April 2021. Currently, he is the lead writer for the weekly Thinkin' Out Loud column, co-host of the Frontstretch Happy Hour podcast, and one of our lead reporters. Beforehand, he wrote for IMSA shortly after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2019. Simultaneously, he also serves as a Captain in the US Army.
Follow Dalton on Twitter @PitLaneCPT
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