Keselowski survives chaos as 19 of 40 cars fail to finish
TALLADEGA, ALA. — Brad Keselowski won at Talladega on Sunday afternoon, a day filled with so much chaos and attrition and speculation that your grandma driving the ’78 Nova might have emerged as the only driver left on the track.
It was more than the usual Talladega crash-bam-boom. It was crazy. Four Big Ones. “Side-by-side,” Keselowski said. “Wreck ’em up and flip ’em.”
A concise and astute analysis, considering that only 21 cars completed the188 laps of the GEICO 500, and 35 of 40 cars suffered damage. Almost half the field went spinning, crashing, flying, banging and slamming in a race that became a survivalist demolition derby.
“I hate it,” Kyle Busch said. “I’d much rather [have] been home.”
“We all have to do it,” Austin Dillon said. “I don’t how many really love it.”
And those were the guys who finished second and third, respectively.
Nobody likes to sign up for the possibility of a day when your car will go flipping up and down, a mangled mess of uncontrollable sheet metal. It happened to Cup series rookie Chris Buescher when he went barrel-rolling three times before the car finally stopped.
“I saw it happening in front of us and checked up and the next thing I knew I was upside down,” Buescher said. “I am pretty sick and tired of speedway racing at this point. It has been a rough year for that.”
Later in the race, Matt Kenseth’s Toyota went flying after it was slammed by Danica Patrick’s Chevrolet. She had been turned by Michael McDowell.
No doubt the safety issue will be revisited before the restrictor-plate pack heads back to Daytona in July. Dillon’s Chevy went flying in the night at the end of the last lap of the Coke Zero 400 last summer. His car had shattered into pieces. Now this. “Of course it’s not what I wanted to see,” Keselowski said. “When cars get off the ground bad things happen.”
The Big Bang approach to racing brought out 10 cautions, eating up 41 laps. The Big One? Try plural. There were 21- and 12-car accidents in the final 28 laps. An accident on the front stretch on the last lap took out seven cars.
The first Big One of the day involved Buescher’s dramatic ride.
In a less dramatic turn of events, Dale Earnhardt Jr., one of the pre-race favorites, was involved in two accidents and finished last. He spun out of control without contact 50 laps into the race.
Keselowski scored his fourth overall victory at Talladega, leading a race-high 46 laps in five increments. He took the outside line on a restart with three laps left, and Busch never had enough speed to get to him to make a legitimate run.
“I never got enough momentum to get a move on him,” Busch said.
Not surprisingly, the race ended on the final caution, with more chaos behind the leaders on the final turn.
“You never know what you are going to get here,” Keselowski said. “Talladega has always been that way, but it’s been very good to me. ... Crazy day. Somehow we managed to stay ahead of or out of all the chaos.”
Maybe the action wouldn’t have been quite as frenetic if not for storm clouds that hovered closely most of the day, threatening to put a stop to the race at any point once everyone got to the halfway point, which makes a race official.
Despite having Air Titans on the property, Talladega has no lights, meaning that a restart would have been unlikely.
“Racing has always been a battle of daredevils and chess players,” Keselowski said, “This has always been more of a daredevil-type track.”
Most of the daredevils ended up in dangerous places Sunday. It’s never fun playing chess either when a car is spinning out of control going nearly 200 miles an hour.