‘Dega, baby.
The NASCAR Cup Series is at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama this weekend for the Jack Link’s 500, and as is usually the case at the sport’s biggest track, you never really know what’s going to happen.
The first stage of the race was a fuel mileage game, with teams playing different strategies to make it to the end of the stage. Ryan Preece led a group of Fords to win the first stage, but it wasn’t long into the second stage before all hell broke loose.
Bubba Wallace was leading the pack in his #23 car for 23XI Racing, with Ross Chastain behind him giving a push. But Chastain jumped up to the middle lane, and Bubba quickly followed suit – but with both cars changing lanes, it stacked up the field behind them and caused a push from about 4 cars back, sending Chastain’s car into Wallace and sending Bubba sideways into the outside wall.
The spin in front of pretty much the entire field collected…well, pretty much the entire field, which was still bunched up and running within a couple seconds of each other from the restart.
Talk about the “Big One.”
After the wreck, Bubba took responsibility for the wreck and said he needs to “figure out how to be pushed better.”
“I take responsibility on that. We’ll have a good debrief and figure out what we can do to make our Toyotas a little bit better being pushed and maybe not have that happen.”
There were only 4 cars at the front of the field, including Chastain, who made it through the wreck unscathed, and a few cars at the back who were able to sneak through without damage. But the wreck knocked out a number of contenders, including Wallace, Kyle Larson (who has been terrible at superspeedways), Ryan Blaney, Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, Ty Gibbs, and many, many more.
The good news is that there were several drivers who made it through the wreck who are in desperate need of a win. Ross Chastain, and his entire Trackhouse Racing team, has struggled this season, and he came into the race 20th in points. Chastain started the race as a longshot, with DraftKings giving him +2500 odds of a win. But his chances got a lot better, and he’s currently sitting at +700 after the wreck, now the favorite to take the checkered flag.
That’s Talladega.
It appears that quite a few of the cars are going to be able to continue after making repairs, and earlier this year we saw Tyler Reddick win a race at Atlanta without a right front fender after being caught up in a wreck. So you never know who could end up pulling this one off, but man…not what you want to see just halfway through the race.
Of course it might not be the last “Big One” either.
