Crash a violent reminder that road courses can bite (cont'd)

The cars of Reed Sorenson and Michael Waltrip were also involved. NASCAR officials had to stop the race so workers could repair the tire barrier and replace the sand barrels, as well as remove copious amounts of debris. Drivers were left wondering what exactly had happened.

"That was a big hit for a bunch of guys," Blaney said. "I didn't see it really getting started or anything. You just couldn't see through the cars, and at that spot there you can't really see the car in front of you, and you can't tell what's going on in front of that. I think that's a bad place for the spotters to see what's going on. That didn't help, and everybody just kept coming."

"That was a nasty wreck out there," added Nemechek. "What's tough about that is everybody is on the gas coming off the corner hard. Then all of a sudden two guys got turned sideways. When that happens, you can't stop quickly. We all kept piling into each other."

After the race NASCAR summoned both Gilliland and McDowell to the series hauler, where the two drivers watched a replay of the accident. "He said he didn't really realize I was on the outside of him, and just kind of came up and put us in the wall," said Gilliland, who added that he was sore but otherwise OK. "It was a disappointing ending to a decent day we had going."

McDowell's take: "Him and I were racing hard, and I got underneath him going in there. He pretty much came down like I wasn't there. I tried to back out of it not to get into him, but he went wide, so I kept the momentum up. It almost seemed like he tried to come back at me for getting a little bit wide, but after watching it, it looked like it was a racing deal, and it wasn't anything blatant. It just turned into a big mess with all the other cars that got caught up into it. I'm just glad that David's all right, and everybody could walk away."

The post-race meeting was evidently a precaution, NASCAR's way of making sure the two drivers didn't take any sort of beef to Michigan next week. They won't.

"We raced around each other all day, and never touched each other, never nothing," Gilliland said. "Just one of those deals. Everybody, I think, gets a little impatient there at the end of a race, and it's just a shame it had to happen."

Impatience seemed to be a popular culprit. Those involved in the wreck say they weren't helped by others who tried to gain a few positions on the score sheet by barreling through. "I know with [seven] to go, you've got to get up on the wheel and push hard, but that's too much," Papis said. "I don't know exactly what happened. I need to see the replay. Pushing and shoving is OK, but that was crazy. It was just crazy. There were cars everywhere. I had nowhere to go."

McDowell, who after the accident was left eight owner points behind A.J. Allmendinger for the 35th and final guaranteed starting spot next week, agreed. "It just seems like no one ever checks up," he said. "If you see smoke, and you see cars sideways, they're going to be sideways when you get there. You'd think they'd roll out of it. But everybody thinks they can get one or two more spots if they keep their foot in it. That's what it looks like to me. It's unfortunate for everybody, but when I see smoking cars spinning, I usually roll out and get on the brakes pretty soon."

Watkins Glen isn't a rolling, overly technical road course like Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., site of the other road circuit on the Sprint Cup tour. The New York track is a layout built for speed, with long straights that put a premium on horsepower. The speed has its price, as NASCAR discovered in 1991 when driver J.D. McDuffie died after a brake failure sent his car flying into a tire barrier. Years later, a then-little-known Busch driver named Jimmie Johnson was involved in a similar accident but walked away thanks to a number of safety advances.

Thankfully, all the drivers involved Sunday walked away as well. But the accident was a stark reminder that road courses can bite, even if they don't produce the faster speeds of their oval brethren.

"Just because you're going slow," Hornish said, "doesn't mean that it will be any less spectacular."