Debate raised after Austin Dillon’s crash at Daytona
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SPARTA, Ky. — Jamie McMurray couldn’t see much. His No. 1 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet propelled wildly across the start-finish line under a shower of debris after being collected in the last-lap wreck that sent Austin Dillon’s airborne No. 3 into the catch fence in Sunday’s midnight Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway.
Judging by restrictor plate track history, McMurray expected that the steady rhythm of drafting was about to hit a sharp note in the race’s final whirl around the superspeedway.
“When we came off Turn 2, there was a huge pack of cars and you’re gently pushing the guy in front of you and pushing him into the guy in front of him,” McMurray recalled at Kentucky Speedway on Thursday. “And I think all of us knew heading into Turn 3 that when we came into Turn 4, it would not be gentle anymore. You’re just going to mash the gas and shove the guy as hard as you can and hope that you make it through the wreck because all of us knew there was going to be a wreck either before the finish line or afterwards.”
But this wreck’s severity may have been a tad more than McMurray and the rest of the field anticipated. Brad Keselowski experienced a firsthand look at the scene outside his window net, as his spinning No. 2 ride smacked hard into Dillon’s upside-down vehicle seconds after the rest of cars cleared. It’s a difficult subject to talk about for the 31-year-old driver, as his Team Penske Ford slipped in oil around 200 mph, allowing driver control to fall to the wayside.
“Kind of the sad part is that I was honestly embarrassed that I hit Austin that long after the wreck,” Keselowski said at Kentucky Speedway Thursday. “… There was just so much debris that even being as far behind as I was, you couldn’t slow down at 200 mph. And that was frustrating. I felt very, very lucky when I got out of the car, went to Austin, saw that he was OK.
“… Race cars are very, very well-designed and built for high impacts. They’re not ever going to be very well-designed for multiple high impacts. So, when I hit Austin the second time, yeah I saw his first impact and when I knew I was going to hit the second time, his odds were a lot lower walking away.”
With the cars’ tight drafting and high speeds, the “Big One” has become synonymous with restrictor plate racing at Daytona and Talladega Superspeedway. And with the startling images of the wreck emblazoned in the minds of spectators and drivers alike, Dillon’s wild ride resurfaced the ongoing question: are restrictor plate races’ speeds safe enough?
For fellow Sprint Cup Series driver Greg Biffle, whose No. 16 ride was also caught up in the final lap frenzy, driver/spectator welfare is — and has been — the first priority. Despite Keselowski’s testimony that he wasn’t able to slow down in time to avoid hitting Dillon, Biffle doesn’t believe that slowing down the cars will mitigate the wrecks. Rather, he raises the point that the style of restrictor plate racing itself is what manifests into multicar melees.
“Your first reaction is that these cars are really safe,” Biffle said on Thursday at Kentucky Speedway. “… These cars, when you get bunched up and one guy gets jammed underneath the other guy and you’re pushing these cars, they’re gonna get upside-down or flip up in the air no matter what speed we’re going. If we’re going 125 miles an hour when you jam a wedge underneath another one, it’s gonna pick it up in the air.”
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To Biffle, Dillon’s mangled No. 3 Chevrolet and smashed catch fence serve as proof of safety rather than a cause for alarm. Rather than shaking a finger in disapproval, the Roush Fenway Racing driver applauded the efforts of the industry and its strides to making the sport safer.
“It’s just a testament to how safe our sport is,” Biffle said. “NASCAR has done an unbelievable job with SAFER barriers, and run-off areas, and paving areas. I think about how dangerous Pocono was and how safe of a race track it is now with all of the paving and the SAFER barriers they’ve done on the inside.
“I know it takes time for these tracks to react to these situations, but it just goes to show you that the engineering and what-not on that fence is what it needs to be and what it’s supposed to be and it did its job. The safety equipment did the job inside the car and the good thing is we can learn from that and try to make improvements if we can.”
The incident still serves as a call to action for many drivers, as the sport continues to learn from past wrecks and on-track instances.
“… You hope that you can learn from it and figure out a way to keep the cars on the ground, contain them from the fans even better than what we have.” McMurray said. “You look back in the years in the sport and everything that we have has evolved from something like that. NASCAR has done a really nice job of learning from their mistakes and learning from accidents on the track and hopefully we’ll learn from this one as well.”