NASCAR communications director offers update after wild Ryan Preece crash at Daytona, what's next

While the Daytona 500 was a thoroughly compelling race, it was hard to look past the accident involving Ryan Preece and not wonder how horribly wrong things could have gone had a few cars hit a few different places on the track.

Preece went fully airborne after his car ramped up onto the front right hood of Erik Jones. It caught enough air to flip entirely over.

The driver of the No. 60 was fine after being checked out in the health care center, but he was shaken up enough to issue a stern warning to NASCAR: The cars need work or someone else could suffer a much, much worse fate.

So how did NASCAR react in the wake of the crash?

NASCAR’s managing director of communications Mike Forde opened up on the steps taken after the Ryan Preece accident on the Hauler Talk podcast.

“The steps taken at the race track was our safety team was on the ground, so Dr. John Patalak, Matt Harper, David Green, they were all down at Daytona this weekend, as they are for many of the restrictor plate races, if not all of them. Did a preliminary investigation on the 60 car. Looked over it. And the preliminary results were that the structure of the car held up well.

“One note on the Next Gen car, the original design that has stayed true throughout the iterations as it got more safe following some driver feedback was that this car, especially that center section, was built for the catastrophic wrecks. Namely the Ryan Newman type wrecks. And we used the learnings from the Ryan Newman wreck to really help design this car. Those seem to have worked for the preliminary investigation.”

That’s certainly good news and undoubtedly one of the major reasons Ryan Preece is walking around relatively no worse for the wear today.

The second step was collecting a bunch of data.

“Tuesday morning our safety team went over to RFK Racing right across the street from the R&D center, had a meeting at 8:30 a.m. and they looked at the car, met with the team,” Forde said. “So we are taping this on a Tuesday afternoon, so they are still poring over that data.

“Preliminary feel is that the car held up pretty well and the structure is in a good spot. When we have blowovers — I don’t want to say this was exactly a blowover — but when we have cars get on their roofs, there’s kind of two items you’ve got to think about. One is safety, and that’s part of the safety engineering team, which is led by Dr. John Patalak, then there’s the areo side of it, which is led by Dr. Eric Jacuzzi. Kind of two different discussions. They all work in concert with each other.”

There was one area that bears further scrutiny in the Ryan Preece case.

“So safety we feel good about. The aero side, they have been working on increasing the lift-off speed for years but especially concerted effort over the last I think probably since the Michigan race when the 7 of (Corey) LaJoie blew over,” Forde said. “And added some parts and pieces throughout the playoffs and then added a couple more after Daytona and are continuing that effort.”

The real question that will be on everyone’s mind, especially that of Ryan Preece, is how soon further changes might be implemented that can make the cars safer at superspeedways.

Could it happen as soon as Talladega?

“You could (see that), for sure. I think it largely depends on what happens with this test that we have, the wind tunnel test,” Forde said. “I think that would be the, not the finish line, but that would be the next moment in time where we would add some parts and pieces. That’s typically, to your point, is when we have something like this, you look at the next superspeedway race just because of the speeds and the tightness of that type of racing. That’s what we really want to tackle.”