DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Despite NASCAR president Mike Helton's concern about Brad Keselowski's airborne car Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, don't look for a solution to flying stock cars in the short term, if ever.

While preventing cars from getting airborne is a worthy goal, the violence and unpredictability of NASCAR racing probably makes it unreachable, Cup Series director John Darby said Tuesday.

NASCAR's response

NASCAR president Mike Helton talks about the punishment for Carl Edwards and his concern about Brad Keselowski's car getting airborne at Atlanta.

• NASCAR announcement
• Three-race probation
• Caraviello: Time and place
• No. 12 car goes airborne
• First incident at Atlanta
• Race Chatter: Edwards

And Darby reiterated that the coming return of spoilers on the back of Cup cars was largely an aesthetic change, not a functional one.

"The one thing that's very, very hard for us to deal with is there's a huge difference between a car being lifted off the ground by air and being knocked up into the air by another car," Darby said. "So the biggest roof flaps in the world or the biggest parachute in the world may not bring a car back to the race track once it's catapulted up off the race track from the forces of another car.

"We can test and we can make additions and we can do everything we can to help keep the cars on the ground -- a car that spins and turns and wants to come up, but the aero devices won't let it. What's hard to do is to displace the energy of a second car being involved and physically pushing the car up into the air."

Earlier Tuesday, Helton promised NASCAR would develop a solution for cars prone to taking off and flying through the air during stock car racing accidents on its highest-speed race tracks.

Helton made his claims after announcing Carl Edwards would be on probation for the next three Cup races for intentionally spinning out Keselowski at more than 190 mph on Atlanta's frontstretch.

With two laps remaining of the scheduled 325-lap event on the high-speed 1.5-mile track, Keselowski's Dodge went airborne and flipped into the frontstretch wall following contact from Edwards' Ford.

FOX Sports' TV replays showed Edwards' white-gloved hands moving his steering wheel to the right, turning his car into the back of Keselowski's car, which caused the red No. 12 to spin backwards. The car immediately lifted into the air and turned over, striking the top of the wall, upside-down with the driver's-side corner of the windshield "A-post."

Ironically it was the second time in less than a year the two drivers were involved in a crash that sent a car into a frontstretch barrier. In spring 2009 at Talladega, the pair made contact heading for the checkered flag, Edwards' car turned around and flew -- also making contact with another car on the way -- into the catchfence above the wall. A number of spectators were injured.

But Keselowski's car getting airborne at a 1.5-mile track was a bigger issue than Edwards' action Sunday, Helton said.

Growing concern

Since Ryan Newman's flip at Talladega, cars going airborne are becoming more frequent.

• Complete story

"The car getting airborne was a very serious issue," Helton said. "We've not seen a car get airborne much on a mile-and-a-half race track and that's something that is very important to us. We're going to study [it] very closely and figure out things that we can do to help prevent this very quickly in the future."

History has shown stock cars can fly -- to a great degree in the last two decades as stock car speeds rose -- even going back to the early 1980s when Cup cars were "downsized" from a fairly bulky configuration. But flying cars have been extremely rare at tracks other than Daytona and Talladega.

NASCAR has tried a variety of aerodynamic configurations to keep cars on the ground, including a longitudinal "shark fin" that debuted at Daytona.

The same configuration was used at Atlanta, though not in the same dimensions. And the roof and cowl flaps on Keselowski's car -- mechanical devices designed to alter airflows and air pressures to help keep cars on the ground -- all deployed as designed.

The car still flew, and Darby reiterated it's virtually as inevitable as it is unpredictable.

"There's two things," Darby said. "There's many times where cars spin, and if you look back to before we even had roof flaps, they'd spin and just lift straight up into the air. That's the situation that's been brought back under control through the use of roof flaps and different fins on the rear glass, rails on the roof and side-skirts below the doors and all of those things.

"The things that you aerodynamically prevent -- and I'll go all the way back to Geoff Bodine's truck getting up into the catchfence at Daytona [at Speedweeks 2000], where he collided and ran over the rear tire of the truck that he collided with and that shot him up in the air -- in those kinds of situations, the energy that ultimately launches those vehicles, I don't know if you can aerodynamically overcome."

Later this month, NASCAR has scheduled all-inclusive tests for Cup Series teams at the 2.66-mile Talladega track and the 1.5-mile Charlotte Motor Speedway, where flat-blade spoilers -- historically part of a stock car's look in the entire modern era that began in 1971 -- will be used.

Darby said not to expect the spoiler's return to be a cure-all.

"What we know is the difference in liftoff [speed] between the spoiler and the wing is either so small that we can't measure it, or there isn't any," Darby said. "But with that being said, there are additions that are being made to the car, that we did make for Daytona and Talladega that enhance the liftoff speed.

"Our aero crew is currently on their way again to Detroit to run a whole series of tests to look for more information to see if there are more additions to the car that we can make to improve on what we have. That's pretty routine and we do that all year."

But after the tests, spoilers will replace the wings currently mounted on the rear decks of Cup cars. It'll mark the end of the wing's three-year lifespan on NASCAR's new car.

"It'll be an across-the-board change," Darby said. "I know where [the question's] coming from. When we left Daytona [this year] after arguably one of the best Daytona 500s anybody had ever watched, there was a group of people that said 'holy crap, why would they change anything? That was just too good.'

"But for all of the same reasons that we decided to change to the wing initially, with the number one reason driving that being the appeal to the fans -- and the majority of the fans just don't like the wing -- so we're going to continue down that path. Everybody loves spoilers, nobody likes wings.

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The biggest roof flaps in the world or the biggest parachute in the world may not bring a car back to the race track once it's catapulted up off the race track from the forces of another car.

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-- JOHN DARBY

"What we did learn, and what we do with that is, we take the aero package that we left Daytona with, for example, and create a spoiler that replicates, as closely as we can, the same downforce and drag and all of the things that made that combination at Daytona work. And everybody says it's more visually appealing."

What was brutally ugly in the aftermath of Sunday's accident was Keselowski's badly warped Dodge. Penske Racing took Keselowski's car back to its shop complex in Mooresville, N.C., but it was going to deliver the car to NASCAR's R&D facility in Concord, N.C., this week, Darby said late Tuesday afternoon.

"We don't have it back here yet," Darby said. "But what I do know is that most of the ugliness came from sheet metal damage. There is some deformation of the rollcage in the left-front corner, which is fairly typical. Once we receive the car we will do a full study and measurement of everything -- what moved where, what worked and what worked well.

"The driver got out under his own power, out of the driver's window and pretty gingerly ran down the bank to the ambulance so if you look at 'pass' or 'fail' in its basic form you would have to say 'pass' because the driver was able to do that, right?

"From a structural or an engineering side of it, that's what our guys in the back room will be working on for the next couple of weeks, is a whole bunch of testing and measuring to see [what happened] and to give us an official report card from an engineering standpoint."

Helton said NASCAR's large crew of engineers at its R&D Center would pore over the data and Keselowski's ruined No. 12 Dodge race car. It mimics what NASCAR did last fall when Ryan Newman's No. 39 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet turned over at Talladega.

"What we're [going to do] with the No. 12 car is study it," Helton said. "We've got a lot of technology with data recorders, just like we do with the No. 39 car in Talladega. Now we've got the second element of the No. 12 car from Atlanta.

"We can look at the dimensions of the car, we can look at the impact that the car took and the reaction of the roll cage and the [roll] hoop and different elements that we saw that did their job, but how much better can we make those components work so that doesn't happen again?

"We also can look from the technology, the data recorder, the speeds, all the things that we have access to today to determine the high speed in Atlanta maybe on par with Daytona and Talladega now. If that's the case, where else does that transfer to? Then we'll come up with a reaction from all of that study."