Ben Kennedy‘s Red Horse Racing No. 11 Toyota made contact with two other trucks, then became airborne, clipping the catch fence and the energy-absorbing SAFER barrier as the truck rode along the outside retaining wall in Turn 1 before coming to rest.

No debris was reported in spectator areas, and Kennedy emerged shaken but unhurt. The race was halted five laps short of the complete distance because of the damage, with two-time series champion Matt Crafton declared the winner.

A Kentucky Speedway spokesperson said that track workers spent 3 1/2 hours making repairs. A NASCAR representative said that 35 feet of catch fencing and two support posts were replaced, as were 15 "pyramids" — the impact-reducing foam blocks behind the steel-tubed exterior wall as part of the SAFER (Steel And Foam Energy Reduction) system. No other structural repairs were necessary for the SAFER barrier, the NASCAR spokesperson said. 

One invested viewer was Sprint Cup Series regular Kyle Busch, whose team fielded three trucks in Thursday night’s UNOH 225. Busch said he was entertained by the quality of the racing, hoping that Saturday night’s Sprint Cup event emulated the slipping, sliding, multi-groove show.

Busch also lauded the sanctioning body’s progress in safety, but said that despite the improvements and extra measures, inherent danger still exists in the high-speed sport. Kennedy’s crash came on the heels of Austin Dillon‘s frightening wreck that severely damaged the Daytona International Speedway catch fence earlier in the week. 

"As far as the catch fence and everything, I’m glad they’re there," Busch said. "I’m glad they’re obviously doing their job, they’re keeping the race cars or trucks on the race track and so it’s a dangerous sport. We live it every day. Sometimes we take it for granted because of all the safety advancements we’ve gotten over the years that we feel invincible but there’s certainly rare, opportune times that you can put yourself in a situation to get hurt. We saw it in Daytona with myself, we saw it in Daytona again with Austin Dillon and we probably saw it again last night among other times. Those times just seem to be the most severe, the most scary crashes that we’ve seen."

MORE: Learn about the SAFER barrier system

"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."

MORE: Dillon discusses how he is feeling | Exclusive video of wreck, 88 crew reacts

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."