Two-car blocking duel ends with 'The Big One'

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- At least one veteran Winston Cup driver accepted full blame for his part in a two-car blocking match that resulted in a 14-car accident with less than 25 laps remaining in Saturday night's Pepsi 400 at Daytona International Speedway.

Badly timed cautions -- if you can even accuse them of being timed -- set off the pig-pile entering Turn 1 when Dale Jarrett made an abrupt blocking move to blunt a run by Jeff Burton.

The field had strung itself out by running 65 laps under green before Tony Stewart spun in Turn 2 for the second time in the race. After pit stops and with the field bunched together on fresh tires, seven laps later Jarrett made his move coming out of the tri-oval.

"I don't blame Dale Jarrett," Burton's crew chief Frank Stoddard said. "But there are some spotters up there you need to look out for. We had scanners on the 88, and he (spotter) said on the radio, 'He's inside of you, block him, block him.'

"When you have people like that on the radio saying things like that, you're going to have crashes like that -- case dismissed."

Dale Jarrett defiantly walks alongside an ambulance en route to his pit after crashing at Daytona on Saturday.

"That's just racing at Daytona -- I was trying to protect my position," Jarrett said. "Sometimes you make that move and you're OK and other times it doesn't work out so good."

"I got under him and he did what restrictor-plate racing forces you to do and that's block," Burton said. "He went to block me and my fender was at his quarter panel. We hit and away we went.

"The drivers caused the wreck. I feel like he was more at fault than I was, but I was there so I had a part to play in it, too.," Burton continued. "It's just racing. I'm not mad about it and I hope he's not mad about it.

"The notion that cautions cause cautions, at this racetrack that's 100 percent correct."

The FOX Sports broadcast of the race brought up a couple questionable moments following the wreck. As Jarrett's out-of-control car slewed through the pack, it tripped Joe Nemechek's No. 25 UAW-Delphi Chevrolet out of control and into a violent right front impact into the Turn 1 wall.

Nemechek, who won Friday night's NASCAR Busch Series Stacker 2/GNC Live Well 250, suffered a bruised foot when he said it got tangled up in his car's pedals on impact, but he was treated and released from the track's infield care center shortly after arriving.

Another out-of-control car hit Mike Skinner and slapped Brett Bodine, who had almost snuck through, and knocked it into another frighteningly similar impact to Nemechek's. After the car rolled, catching fire, into the infield and Bodine staggered away from it, it merrily burned for several minutes before fire crews responded.

The wreck eliminated the cars of Bodine, Nemechek, Skinner, Jarrett and Steve Park, while those of Burton, Bobby Labonte and Matt Kenseth were badly damaged but finished.

In the meantime, Jarrett had milled around the apron in Turn 1 and, disgusted with the lack of medical response, began walking back towards pit road. An ambulance met him after he was more than halfway back -- near the pit exit -- and he visibly snarled a response to an offer for a lift.

"I stood around and I walked around and I walked halfway back to my pit before an ambulance ever came," Jarrett said, "so if they can't get them any sooner than that, to hell with them."