Ross Chastain on Sunday hit the right chords, with his driving style in the music city of Nashville. While the Trackhouse Racing driver rose up to his hard-earned victory, another driver fell victim to a harrowing crash during the Stage 2 restart. And could have surely proved to be detrimental to the driver.
While enough has been said by the drivers regarding their on-track safety, Ryan Blaney’s crash on Sunday proves the fact there is a long way to go for the authorities, to completely assure the safety of the drivers.
While was the primary point of discussion among Denny Hamlin and co-host Jared Allen and also their guest, Hendrick Motorsports driver William Byron, on the episode of Action Detrimental, they also discussed the incident that led to the horrific incident.
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William Byron Breaks Down the Causes That Could Have Led to the Apparent Mishap of Ryan Blaney
The Ally 400 on Sunday surely delivered a remarkable show from the drivers without any major on-track incidents. In the 300-lap race, the yellow flag was shown only four times. Among these, one was shown for a major accident that involved Team Penske’s, Ryan Blaney. And Denny Hamlin and HMS’s William Byron trace back the cause that led to the incident in their latest episode of the podcast.
The inception of the incident can be owed to the slow start of Brad Keselowski at Lap 147 of Stage 2. As William Byron made contact with Keselowski, this eventually gave rise to a chain of events that eventually let to Blaney crashing head on in the inner wall.
Byron in the podcast expressed, “I was pushing Brad, I had Ross behind me, and he was laid back quite a bit. So I had a huge around and I am pushing Brad at the start-finish when I moved out to pass pushing him. And it looked like he bounced off the chip real hard. I watched the in-car, sounded like just going into gear.”
To this Denny Hamlin retorted, “And NASCAR posted these in-cars that they have got now, they put it up on-site pretty quick, I watched him and he was accelerating, usually, you can see or hear, you get to run into it. Like the RPMs will go up but it seems like, he went and it didn’t get in gear. I didn’t see a huge bump.”
“I guess it was the timing, like maybe his shift came up earlier because I was hitting them,” Byron added.
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While this late restart surely led to a bottleneck effect, it was Blaney who received the worst, after he hit the walls without the SAFER barrier. His car was mangled after hitting the wall at a right angle.
The JGR driver explained, “Blaney got the worst end of it. I was looking at the speed and I was like, he was slowing down a lot. I wondered if he let off the brake, so then he could steer, because it looked like he was sliding and was getting slower and then he hit the concrete or asphalt and then he sped up again, not like hitting the gas.”
“But looked like he just got off the brake trying to let it correct, because he knew that he would hit the wall, which increases the speed. He obviously hit the part of the track, that did not have a SAFER barrier. And trust me that broke my back up, hitting the wall without the safer barrier, it stinks for sure,” Hamlin continued.
In the post-race interview, Blaney, after sustaining the accident, had exclaimed that he would “pay for the f***ing thing” for the construction of SAFER barriers. But as the 2x Daytona winner shares, things might have slipped from NASCAR’s perspective. However, he assures that NASCAR would surely fix these problems and make sure that these are not further repeated.
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The incident was surely unfortunate for Blaney and his team. But it can only be hoped that authority comes up with a proper idea and assures the drivers that their lives are not jeopardized on the tracks.