Brad Keselowski exited a pulse-pounding GEICO 500 at Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday with a win—but by the time the No. 2 Miller Lite Ford Fusion made it to Victory Lane, the talk around the sport was of the carnage that had just unfolded on the 2.66-mile track.
Over the course of the 188-lap event 35 of the starting 40 race cars took damage, leaving just five unscathed from major incident, including Brad’s White Lite. Each race on the massive Alabama tri-oval creates an expectation of “The Big One,” but many around the sport thought that the four Big Ones seen on Sunday were just too big. Marred by four major crashes, the Talladega race ended up with the cars of Chris Buescher and Matt Kenseth gaining some air time. In the media center, the race winner and his crew chief Paul Wolfe weighed in on the collisions, and the state of safety in NASCAR.
“I think it’s part of the allure to coming here, is that you don’t know what you’re going to get. As a racer and a driver, you have to be prepared for either way and take advantage of the situation and we were able to do that today with an all around solid day,” Brad said. “I’ve been asked about the crashes, but I didn’t see it, thankfully because I was in front of them. But that’s how Talladega goes. I hate it to hear about cars flipping and those things, nobody wants that. Some accidents here and there, we may not cheer about it, but it’s part of the sport and always has been part of automobile racing.”
Wrecks always have been and always will be a part of racing, and Brad has long been a proponent of NASCAR’s incredible progress when it comes to keeping drivers safe. If anything, Talladega served as proof of NASCAR’s growth in that field. On a day where 35 drivers were involved in wrecks at speeds upwards of 200 mph, all walked away without serious injury. At the same, Brad notes that safety improvements should never come to a halt—for the sake of both drivers and spectators.
“I couldn’t agree more that we don’t want cars to go in the air. There’s no guarantee where they are going to land, we don’t want them in a fan’s lap,” BK said on controlling airflow over and under these 3,400-pound racecars. “It’s not what we want to see when cars get off the ground, bad things happen even more so and bad things happen beyond that acceptable risk factor. It’s something we’ll have to look into and see what we can do better, but any aero flips should be scienced out.”
Wolfe chimed in as well, breaking down the dilemma the sport faces, explaining that the sport has already done so much to prevent cars from going airborne.
“NASCAR works very hard at that
The knowledge that NASCAR is doing everything within its power to make the sport safer does put a driver’s mind at ease—but only to a certain extent. As professional drivers, assuming the risks and dangers of racing is also part of the job. Deciding to assess the tracks on a bravery vs. logic thinking, Brad swayed Talladega towards the former of the two.
“Racing has always been that balance of daredevils and chess players. Some weekends we’re chess players, some weekends we’re daredevils, and this has always been more of the daredevil style track,” Brad explained. “This one is in-your-face challenging, to where if you make a mistake, it can be a really, really bad wreck…The fact you know what can happen, and despite it, you’re going to make a move inches from another driver, going to cut him off, push him, drive sideways, and you’re going to hang it out there knowing that really bad things can happen. I think it’s special to be able to win under these circumstances, under that level of adversity, it’s a change I’ve always embraced.”
With the Talladega spring race, as well as the Sprint Cup Series crown jewel, the Daytona 500, in the books, just two more mentally draining restrictor plate races remain on the 2016 slate. In nearly two months, the series returns to Daytona for the annual July race—which was highlighted last year by the last-lap flight of Austin Dillon’s No. 3 car into the catchfencing. Then comes a second trip to Dega in October during the Chase for the Sprint Cup, where drivers are unlikely to pull any punches with their championship hopes on the line.