Nascar is one of the most demanding forms of motorsport and the last race at Talladega Superspeedway showed exactly what some drivers can face while racing. He explained how NASCAR “racing has always been that balance of daredevils and chess players”, which is fine by him.
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Whenever you’re watching a race at a track like Daytona or Talladega, really the only part you need to see is the ending; anticipation of “the big one”. You could go airborne. Sunday is how it can happen and July 2015 is how it could have happened.
HOW KESELOWSKI WON: It was a matter of survival of the fittest, as the No. 2 stayed out of trouble nearly the entire race, stayed in or near the top-10 and grabbed the lead for good with 17 laps remaining (Lap 172).
When NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver says there is “no real fix” to the current state of restrictor plate racing, he speaks from experience. He said the whole thing was more embarrassing than anything.
“A couple of big hits, so I can’t wait to get out of this place”, he said. “Even (the last restart) we’re sitting third and I’m like, ‘Well, we could win or we could end up on a wrecker with the roof torn off'”. I don’t think of it that way.
Thats not entirely true about Talladega, which more times than not turns into a mess of wrecked race cars. Oh, and in between?
“I have a pretty decent bruise on my arm and my foot, and my head feels like I hit a wall at 200”, she said.
No, not then he didn’t.
Earnhardt is referring to Sunday’s Talladega race where 35 of 40 cars were involved in at least one accident, and Matt Kenseth and Chris Buescher flipped in separate incidents down the backstretch.
Junior and Edwards crashed on lap 110 after Edwards had a tire go down turning his auto to a hard right directly in Junior’s path leaving him nowhere to go. You know that’s that’s not so they got us you know sometimes we run here and for right now lines up against the wall and sometimes we come here and it’s insane side by side and wreck them up clip from. Because, don’t get me wrong, it’s a helluva show. “I don’t need to be here”.
“I’ve grown up in racing, watched a lot of bad crashes”, Dillon said after finishing third.
This much is certain: Drivers hate every minute of it.
It was also Keselowski’s 19th career Sprint Cup victory and his second of the season, having won previously this year at Las Vegas. That’s the reason why we’re walking away from these crashes. “None of the accidents today were at the front”.
It’s time for the drivers to start standing up for themselves and stay home until something changes.
But as she talked about it, she seemed a little resigned to the fact that this was just the nature of restrictor-plate racing.
To some extent, Patrick can just brush it off as the inevitable chaos at Talladega that might be crowd-pleasing but is jarring – both physically and mentally – for those swept up in it. The steering wheel was knocked out of position, and she had her breath knocked out in the collision.
Kyle Busch finished second, and in some ways he could consider himself the first loser at Talladega Superspeedway behind Brad Keselowski. Part of the perverse paradigm of restrictor-plate racing is that while it’s a form of racing that drivers consider random in many ways and not necessarily representative of their skill, it provides an inordinate amount of glory. Then again, as Keselowski acknowledged, there is of course another force at work as well.
“I’m a capitalist. I love capitalism”. “There’s still people paying to sit in the stands, sponsors still on the cars, drivers still willing to get in them. Kind of sounds like it’s self-policing, and there’s enough interest to keep going, so we’ll keep going”.
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Alexander Goot is a writer and producer for Fox Sports 1 in Los Angeles.
