Ryan Preece reacts after flipping in scary Daytona 500 wreck: ‘Something needs to be done’

With four laps to go in the Daytona 500, Ryan Preece found himself in another violent wreck on the backstretch, flipping his car. Preece infamously had a wreck at Daytona in 2023 that led to the track replacing the grass on the backstretch with pavement.

Even without grass, Ryan Preece found himself flipping at Daytona once again. It was a violent wreck that started with Christopher Bell being turned into the outside wall and back down into Preece.

After the wreck, Preece was very serious. He felt that this was another incident that should have never occurred. His car did a wheelie and then flipped head over tail.

“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. “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.”

Ryan Preece didn’t stop there. The RFK Racing driver told the media scrum at the care center about his feelings as well. As the father of a young daughter and a husband, Preece has other priorities in life.

He doesn’t plan on dying out on the race track.

“I don’t know what the right thing to say right now is,” Preece said, via Toby Christie of Racing America. “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].”

Ryan Preece wants something to change at superspeedways

Ryan Preece compared the wreck today to his wreck in 2023. Everything about it was worse than that wreck two seasons ago.

“Everything about it. I mean, everything about it,” he continued. “The airborne, heading towards the fence, it’s not a good place to be in. So, honestly, with a hit like that, a head-on impact, I don’t really think it should have gone airborne, right? Not very happy but ultimately I think the thing I want to say is we had a really fast car. We could only do so much.”

The Daytona 500 had a few hard hits tonight. Christopher Bell getting up into the wall and then into Ryan Preece was probably the most violent. NASCAR has worked on the Next Gen car.