Kyle Petty calls out Talladega after historic crash: 'It's not a great race when that happens'

This year’s YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway featured a 20-plus car wreck, and Kyle Petty had some interesting things to say about the race. In a video for NASCAR, Petty explained why Sunday’s race was not great.

“How do you say it’s a great race when 23 cars crash and there’s only seven that make it back to the line on that lap? It’s not a great race when that happens,” Kyle Petty said. Talladega should not be a fuel-mileage race. From the time they said gentlemen start your engines, there’s guys that set on pit road, ‘I’m not cranking my car. I’m not using gas right now.’ And they didn’t. They were saving fuel before the race even started.

“We praise these guys as the greatest race car drivers in the world. They run three-wide, they run four-wide, and when we have the big wreck, they blame it on Todd Gilliland because he’s a lap car running on the bottom. They can’t run two-wide and pass a lap car? When you’re four-wide, you’re the greatest driver in the world. When you’re two-wide racing you’re butt off, I guess you don’t know how to drive. I don’t know what happened there. Don’t blame it on a lap car at Talladega. There’s plenty of room. I don’t know what that’s all about.”

More on the wreck at Talladega

The wreck happened with five laps remaining. Petty mentioned that Gilliland received blame for the crash, but it started when Austin Cindric was hit by Brad Keselowski. 23 cars were collected in the crash, and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. won the race in overtime.

 “I always obviously feel confident coming back to a place that we’ve won at before and a superspeedway where we always feel pretty confident in our race car,” Stenhouse told reporters after the race.

“So I think, for one, we did exactly what we needed to do in the first stage. You know, put ourselves in position to win that one. The 17 had a huge run there at the end. You always try and play these races out in kind of what-if scenarios, and I thought the 17 had a huge runway too early in the race to try and block it there at the end of the stage, so I settled for second knowing that if it came down to it again, I would probably try and figure out a way to block him if that was for the win.”