NASCAR announced they will reenact the brutal crash between Ryan Preece and Kyle Larson that occurred during the Geico 500 at Talladega Superspeedway this past weekend.
Ryan Preece and Kyle Larson wreck during the Geico 500 at Talladega Superspeedway via Skewcar YouTube
Following a late race restart, Ross Chastain dove to the inside of Noah Gragson, who attempted to block him, but way too late. The contact resulted in Gragson flying into the outside wall hard. Kyle Larson, who was behind both of them spun off the nose of Kyle Busch down the track and into the grass.
Unfortunately, Larson came back up the track and was T-boned by Ryan Preece causing massive damage to the right side of Larson’s car.
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From Preece’s on-board camera, you can hear him lift off the accelerator as Gragson’s vehicle goes spinning into the outside wall. After getting past Gragson, he then hits the accelerator again.
As Larson comes up the track, Preece lifts again, but it was too late and he pile drives right into the side of Larson’s vehicle.
Here’s the in-car camera from Larson’s vehicle:
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After exiting the infield care center Larson told a number of media outlets that he was okay.
He went on to say, “My car is absolutely destroyed. So I’m really lucky that nothing got me inside the car.”
“Just a bummer. We put ourselves in a position, once again, and get caught up in a wreck that’s not my fault. I guess it is what it at this point.”
Preece also indicated that he was okay following the wreck and provided his analysis of the wreck, “What I saw? I don’t know. I saw Talladega, saw aggressive, and that’s expected with a green, white, checkered. When we cleared Noah and kind of the chaos from there, I thought we were good and then Larson, [he was] wrecking, so you’re not in control at that point and he slid and I just happened to be the car that was coming.”
When asked how hard the hit was, he responded, “That was P1 for hit I’ve ever takin in my life. I feel like when I wreck I’m pretty tough and usually not a lot of stuff you think, man, that hurt. That was kind of like somebody poking at me and saying this is gonna nudge you a little bit. Definitely P1 on the hit list for me.”
Ryan Preece and Kyle Larson wreck during the Geico 500 at Talladega Superspeedway via Skewcar YouTube
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He went on to relay, “It knocked a whole lot of things around inside that racecar. I took a glance at the 5 from where I hit him and it looked like it killed the center section on his car.”
To reiterate how hard the hit was, he said, “Picture somebody throwing you on the ground as hard as you can. It doesn’t feel good, but I’m good.”
NASCAR’s Senior Vice President of Competition Elton Sawyer relayed that NASCAR plans to reenact the incident in order to implement new safety measures.
He said, “We have both cars, the 41 and the 5, here. We started the process yesterday. We had the teams come over. They were able to look at the cars. We had good collaboration with them on exactly what they see. Kyle Larson was here yesterday to kind of give his side of it.”
“So today the guys here at the R&D Center, they will start to take the car apart. And, again, we will look to reenact what happened to the best of our ability with the resources that we have,” he detailed. “Again, with the incident data, acquisition system, video, GPS. We’ll put all that in the model and then the learnings that come out of that we will implement in a timely manner, again, to make sure that we are going in the right direction.”
“But the positive news out of all of this is a) Kyle and Ryan and Blaine are all doing well and they’ll be back at the racetrack soon. There will be, obviously, work on our side to look and, although, we would like to have seen the car do some things differently from a safety standpoint, but again the positive is our drivers are here to help us work through the next steps,” he concluded.
What do you make of Sawyer’s comments?