Daytona 500: Denny Hamlin reacts to Ryan Preece airborne wreck, reveals potential solutions

Denny Hamlin knew the wreck Ryan Preece was involved in at the Daytona 500 on Sunday could have led to serious injuries. On Hamlin’s Actions Detrimental podcast, he reacted to Preece’s car flipping multiple times during the final laps of the Daytona 500.

“When he said that this wreck was harder on him than the flip, I would agree 100 percent,” Hamlin said. Anytime your car comes down like flat like that on the bottom, it is a backbreaker. I would be coming in here in a wheelchair. …The flip is what’s going to get all the airtime, but when his car slams back down on the ground, I can’t tell you how hard that hurts. It is just really bad for the spine.”

Hamlin was then asked what NASCAR could do to prevent a wreck like Preece’s from happening again. “I don’t know. Let’s be a little careful with just these knee-jerk reactions,” Hamlin said. “The knee-jerk reactions is why we gotten to run 175 miles an hour on these tracks, and it’s why we’re crashing each other so hard. Let us run 200 with a little more space, and it would be less dangerous.”

The wreck happened with four laps remaining, and it’s the second time Ryan Preece has been involved in an incident like this at Daytona. The first occurred in 2023, and that led to the track replacing grass on the backstretch with pavement.

Ryan Preece reacts to violent Daytona 500 wreck

“I don’t know if it’s the diffuser or what that makes these cars like a sheet of plywood when you walk outside on a windy day,” Preece said to Regan Smith after the wreck on Sunday. “When the car took off like that and it got real quiet all I thought about was my daughter. So, I’m lucky to walk away.

“But we’re getting really close to somebody not being able to. … It’s frustrating when you end your day like this.”

Preece then told reporters he’s not trying to die on the track. “I don’t know what the right thing to say right now is,” Preece said. But I think the thing I want to say as a father as a racer is, we keep beating on a door hoping for a different result, and I think we know where there’s a problem. It’s superspeedways. So, I don’t want to be the example of, when it finally does get somebody, I don’t want it to be me. I’ve got a two-year-old daughter … Something needs to be done. Because cars lifting off the ground like that, it felt, honestly, worse than Daytona in [2023].”

On3’s Jonathan Howard contributed to this story