DAYTONA BEACH, Fla – Nine minutes into the first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series practice session at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway for Sunday’s Coke Zero 400, Brad Keselowski drifted up into last week’s winner Kyle Busch and triggered an 11-car incident.
When Busch spun across the nose of the Keselowski Ford, he was sent sideways down Turn 2, in front of the pack, and collected several contenders who had nowhere to go at the “World Center of Racing”
Michael Annett, Busch, Trevor Bayne, Greg Biffle, Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin, Sam Hornish Jr, Keselowski, Jamie McMurray, Ryan Newman and Martin Truex Jr. were all involved. All but Keselowski went to backup cars for the third restrictor-plate race of the season.
Five of the 11 cars involved have won a Cup race this season.
Busch, returning to the scene of his vicious accident in February’s NASCAR XFINITY Series opener wasn’t thrilled that Keselowski, who sparked the incident emerged unscathed.
“Just looks like the 2 (Brad Keselowski) got into my left rear and he got away unscathed and trashed everybody else’s stuff,” Busch said of the No. 2 of Keselowski. “But I’ve also been in the same boat and caused them before. Its practice so you don’t need to be up a guy’s left rear. I rolled out and got out of the gas, I don’t know how many times, just to not run into the car in front of me because it’s not that time of the game to go.”
For his role, Keselowski, the 2013 Cup champion accepted responsibility for the crash and expressed immediate remorse for all the carnage that followed.
“First of all, it stinks to see 10 cars get torn up,” Keselowski said. “I got a run on Kyle. I tried to go high… had Greg Biffle on my butt so I wanted to go back down low but when I did that, Kyle started to come down and I had Greg there so I ran into the back of Kyle.
“I flat out ran into the back of him. The timing was kind of off. I’m not even sure that I really hit him that hard. Looking at the front of the car, I’m not even sure I hit him at all but it sure does look that way. It’s just a bummer to see cars get torn up.”
With sweltering heat filtering the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series garage, one of the causalities Carl Edwards joined his team in the garage, disassembling the primary car before assisting with the backup car.
“They don’t really like me working on the car that we’re going to race, but the one that we wrecked, they let me work on that all I want,” said Edwards. “It’s kind of nice. I used to work on everything and I don’t ever get to touch anything. I’ve actually got a little bit of grease on one of my hands, I feel like a real racer. Overall, the guys put so much work into this car and it’s really frustrating to get wrecked like that. It’s 90-something degrees out here and it’s slick and everybody is trying to get the best lap they can for weather in case qualifying were to be rained out or something. Just the nature of the beast.
“I slowed down – I saw Kyle (Busch) and Brad Keselowski wrecking and those guys are two of the best at this. That’s the way it goes. I slowed down and somebody just hit me from behind. We got another Subway Toyota and I’ve seen this race won with backup cars and races won at these tracks with backup cars – I saw Kyle win a race in the Xfinity Series with basically no fenders and everything was destroyed. We just want to make sure we get this one to the race now.”
Martin Truex Jr., currently second in the championship standings said despite the crash, his Furniture Row Racing team will be fine Sunday night.
“Everything happened so quickly,” said Truex. “Cars were starting to check up and I then saw the 18 (Kyle Busch) starting to get sideways. I hit the brakes to try to slow down but for some reason our car just went straight into the wall. We have a lot of damage and will be going to a backup car. We’ll be fine.”
Denny Hamlin and Jamie McMurray returned to the track before first practice concluded in their backup cars, which was led by Talladega race winner Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
