NASCAR insiders react to Ryan Preece flipping again at Daytona, possible solutions to issue

NASCAR faces some serious questions again after a major wreck involving Ryan Preece at the Daytona 500 saw his car go fully airborne before flipping over several times.

Preece has now been involved in two hard crashes at Daytona, and his messaging coming out of this one should send a chill down your spine.

“He said when I went up in the air, it got real quiet and I thought of my little girl,” NASCAR insider for The Athletic Jeff Gluck said on The Teardown podcast. “And he said basically I was lucky to walk away and we’re getting really close to somebody not walking away.”

Those few sentences alone should be enough to scare you, if the footage of the brutal crash itself wasn’t.

Gluck discussed the Ryan Preece wreck at length with fellow reporter for The Athletic Jordan Bianchi. The two admitted NASCAR has both done a good job in addressing improved safety measures in recent years and must remain hyper-vigilant on that front.

“I don’t know how you keep these cars on the ground, because that was a really bizarre one that we’ve never seen,” Gluck said of the Ryan Preece wreck. “I first thought he was on (Erik) Jones‘ hood from the one angle. Then I saw, oh that’s how he got up airborne. But instead, like he was doing a wheelie. They showed the alternate angle, he was doing the wheelie and his car kept getting more and more air on it and went into the fence that way, almost up over the wall, over the safer barrier part.

“Obviously glad he’s not injured. But, man, I kind of agree that we all sort of take the safety part for granted sometimes because these guys keep getting in super vicious wrecks and walking away.”

Gluck praised NASCAR for making the races as safe as they are, even knowing you’re never fully out of the woods from something devastating happening.

“I’m not saying it’s lucky, because NASCAR in the R&D department, safety department, they have done an incredible job. But like just the angles that these guys had, it wouldn’t take much, I guess, and this is where the lucky part comes in, if another car had come along and hit him while he’s in the air, then he goes up into the actual fence, the catch fence, it tears the car apart, shreds it. That’s where somebody gets killed. I mean, dang.

“But yeah, so I don’t know what the solution is now because they’ve tried to keep these cars on the ground. We have another one blowing over and the way that it popped the wheelie this time was so strange.”

Bianchi suggested that perhaps the underbelly of the car is the issue with it going airborne, especially after the Ryan Preece liftoff, though he was quick to admit he’s no technical expert.

“One thing I’ve heard and I get really skeptical, I don’t like talking about the technical stuff because it’s over my head, is just the flat bottom,” Bianchi said. “The wind catches it because it’s flat and it’ll carry it. And especially if you look at it tonight when it got pointed upwards, it gets that air underneath it and it’s gone. I don’t know what you can do.

“But what I will say is the bar that Ryan… to NASCAR’s credit, every time there’s a big accident they go back, they re-evaluate and they say, ‘OK, we need to do X, Y, Z.’ So it’s always a continuous evolution. And the bars they’ve put in after some of the recent crashes they have had certainly helped Ryan Preece tonight. Look at the construction of the roof. It was largely intact. That’s a huge testament to this car.”

Still, everyone will be hoping to avoid that kind of scary accident in the future.