Football season is officially over.
The Chiefs ended up squeaking by the Eagles last night in the Super Bowl, and now we have to wait 6 more months before football kicks off again.
But we’re only a week away from NASCAR season.
That green flag waves on the 2023 NASCAR season and the Daytona 500 next Sunday at 2:30pm eastern time, with qualifying on Wednesday and the Duels on Thursday to set the starting lineup.
So while we wait, why not look back and some of the best – and wildest – moments from the Great American Race over the years?
We’re going to start by looking back at one of the most bizarre moments in the 65 year history of the Daytona 500.
The year was 2012. Originally scheduled for Sunday, February 26, rain forced NASCAR to postpone the race until the next day.
The race finally went green at 7 PM on a Monday. But the odd start time for a Daytona 500 was just foreshadowing of the strange sequence of events that would take place late in the race.
On lap 157, a car blew an engine and spun in front of traffic, bringing out the race’s seventh caution flag. As the cars were running around the track at caution speed, Juan Pablo Montoya, who was piloting the #42 Target Chevrolet for Earnhardt Ganassi Racing, reported feeling a vibration in his car.
Montoya drove his car to pit road and his team checked under the car for the source of the problem but wasn’t able to find anything, so they sent him back out on the track.
But as he was entering turn three at near-race speed trying to catch up with the rest of the pack under the caution, whatever had been vibrating in Montoya’s car finally broke and he lost control of his ride.
The car whipped around on Montoya and spun up the track – and right into the back of a jet dryer that was cleaning the track. (If you’re not familiar with NASCAR’s jet dryers, they’re basically jet engines hooked up to trailers on the back of a truck, and they’re pulled around the track to blow off debris and also to dry the racing surface).
The impact caused a huge fireball to erupt from the jet dryer as Montoya’s car slid down the track and came to rest at the bottom of the turn. And it also sent all of the jet fuel from the dryer pouring on to the track.
To make matters worse, though, Terry Labonte then drove through the fuel that had soaked the track, and a spark from his car ignited the massive amounts of gasoline, engulfing the track – and the jet dryer – in massive flames.
(Luckily the driver of the jet dryer, Duane Barnes, had already been able to escape, and although he was taken to a local hospital for treatment, walked away with relatively minor injuries).
Track crews worked furiously to extinguish the giant inferno before it caused irreparable damage to the surface of the track and forced NASCAR to call the race prematurely. And after they were able to get the fire put out, the track crew then brought out a special cleaning agent to get the remainder of the fuel out of the surface of the track.
Just kidding, they brought out boxes of powdered Tide laundry detergent and washed the track down.
The entire episode caused an over two hour delay in the race. And while they waited, one driver gave us a real-time view of what was going on: Brad Keselowski whipped out his cell phone and started tweeting pictures from his racecar and updating us on how the car was handling.
NASCAR ultimately decided to put an end to drivers tweeting from their cars during red flags, banning cell phones from the cars later in the season.
Oh, and that wasn’t all that Keselowski was up to during the break: He also had a pretty epic footrace to the port-a-john with Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Montoya obviously wasn’t able to continue on in the race once it restarted, and afterwards he expressed his surprise about the bizarre incident:
“Something fell in the rear of the car and the car just spun into the jet dryer. I felt a vibration and came in. They looked at everything and everything was ok and I still told them ‘I think there is something broke’ and I was coming back into the pits and the car just spun by itself…
I’ve hit a lot of things—but a jet dryer?”
Even then-NASCAR President Mike Helton, who has been with the sport since 1994, said it was unlike anything he had ever seen:
“You would think after 65 years and running all the races that NASCAR has run … that you’ve seen about everything. You do think about, ‘Oh, my gosh, if that can happen, what else can happen?'”
After the race, it was determined that the damage to the burned section of the track was more extensive than previously thought, so the affected area was completely removed and resurfaced prior to NASCAR’s return to Daytona for the Pepsi 400 in July.
Oh, and as for the car that Montoya was driving that day? Well, the infamous “jet dryer car” now lives on Dale Earnhardt Jr’s property in his famous “racecar graveyard.”
That’s definitely one of the most unique pieces of NASCAR memorabilia – from one of the more bizarre moments in the sport’s history.
