For the second time this season, Corey Lajoie was involved in a NASCAR Cup Series blowover, this time at Michigan International Speedway.
Once again, he walked away unscathed.
Lajoie was racing Noah Gragson in the middle of the pack on Lap 135 when the slightest of contact between the two sent the Spire Motorsports No. 7 spinning towards the infield. Facing the opposite direction, the NextGen Chevrolet Camaro lifted into the air, flipped over and rolled down the backstretch. Upon reaching the infield grass, it dug in and flipped over twice before ultimately landing on its wheels.
It left the industry puzzled over why the car took off the way it did but the general early consensus is that the 15 mph tail wind, occasionally gusting over 20, might have contributed to it.
“I don’t know what it was,” Lajoie said. “That or the wings of an angel but that thing took off quick. I’m not an engineer so I don’t know. Looking at the flags, that was a headwind and the lift off speed is 210 with these cars. We had a 15-20 mph gust too. I don’t know. I don’t like to get upside down and all I can tell you is that it’s no fun.”
Lajoie said the spinning wasn’t painful until reaching the dirt.
“And then its pow, pow, pow,” he explained. “I was wearing a mouth piece sensor so I’ll be curious to see what it registered as.”
Cup Series veteran Jeff Burton, a major safety advocate also working as a television analysts for NBC Sports expressed shock that it happened.
“Quite honestly, that’s just not acceptable,” Burton said. “There’s no way that a car, when it turns like that, should get up into the air that easily. There has been millions of dollars and hours and hours of time spent to prevent that from happening. That’s going to catch everybody by surprise.”
Denny Hamlin says, as an observer to the crash, that he feels like there isn’t a lot to be done to change what happened in this instance.
“The cars I feel like are pretty safe in roll-over situations,” Hamlin said. “Seems like between that and intrusions, that’s kind of the strong point of the Next Gen car. We saw with Preece, he had some bloody eyes, but he had a pretty violent one. His body was banged up, but he didn’t have any serious injuries. That’s what the goal of it was.
“His looked obviously less violent. He was just right in the middle of the straightaway probably doing 185 or so when he turned sideways. I just don’t know that you’re going to be able to slow it down enough to keep the car on the ground in that situation.
“As a driver, I haven’t rolled one over, but I almost would rather roll one over than hit a wall head on at that speed. I just feel like you’re at least getting rid of energy as you are of tumbling.
“I can’t speak for him, but certainly feel like we have a pretty safe car. I feel comfortable with the speeds that we’re at. There’s just going to be a way, when you turn these things sideways, with that pan underneath the bottom, it’s literally like a wedge, the air is pushing that thing right over the top. Short of getting rid of the underbody, I just don’t know how you’re going to stop it.”
For Lajoie, it’s the second time he’s been upside down this season after never flipping over his entire career. It’s continuation of a disappointing season that has him 30th in the championship standings and without a ride for next season as Spire Motorsports said Lajoie wouldn’t be back next season.
He challenged for a top-10 for parts of this race too, leaving him all the more frustrated.
“That’s just about the way the year has gone,” LaJoie said on the television broadcast. “We have a good car and I find a way to flip it upside down. Twice this year we’ve been upside down and I haven’t been upside down in my whole career. That’s just how, unfortunately, the year for our (No.) 7 team’s been. We’ve had speed, just haven’t been able to put it together.”