Brad Keselowski stresses importance of NASCAR keeping cars on the track
No driver is ever going to tell you they enjoy getting airborne during a race, but that’s been a repeated occurrence over the past couple of weeks. The question of how NASCAR can keep the cars on the ground during wrecks is a major one and a highly discussed one at that.
Brad Keselowski became the latest driver to chime in on the topic Saturday ahead of Sunday’s Southern 500 at Darlington. While Keselowski doesn’t have the answer for how to prevent cars from going airborne, he believes something needs to be done.
“I don’t like it,” Keselowski said, via Bob Pockrass FOX Sports. “Nobody likes to come off the ground. I think that’s fairly self-explanatory, but there’s a lot of factors that go into it. I’m not the engineer to solve the problem but I’m smart enough to know it’s one that needs to be solved.”
The conversation came back into focus following Corey LaJoie’s scary flip down the backstretch at Michigan. Multiple cars got airborne this past Saturday at Daytona, with Josh Berry’s No. 4 Ford turning over and hitting the inside wall while he was upside down. Berry came out unscathed from the collision, but it was still a frightening sight to see.
Bubba Wallace addresses cars flipping during recent NASCAR races: ‘Kind of crazy’
NASCAR had taken several steps to prevent violent crashes at Daytona, notably removing the backstretch grass and mandating a new right-side rear-window air deflector. Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, acknowledged that additional work needs to be done to prevent cars from flipping over at superspeedways.
“It’s a complicated situation there when you’re running the speeds that we’re running. And you put multiple cars close together and how they affect each other,” Sawyer said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Tuesday. “Our guys in the back, I know they’ve been working since Saturday night to kind of recreate all that. And still some additional work on our side to be done.”
Appearing on the “The Dale Jr. Download” earlier this week, Bubba Wallace addressed the issue of cars flipping over during wrecks.
“Cars go fast, they’re going to flip. Knock on wood, I’ve never flipped in my career, I’ve gotten close,” Wallace said. “It has been kind of crazy the last two weeks. We’ve seen four flips now, three on the Cup side. It’s just being in the wrong spot at the wrong time, being in a bad spot.
“I thought LaJoie’s was pretty wild, but man the wind was gusting so hard. We had a massive headwind in Michigan. That plays a factor. …I think LaJoie is the only one where it’s like, ‘What happened there?’ The other stuff is what we’ve seen years down the road. Simple enough, don’t crash, don’t flip.”
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