Ryan Preece has simply had enough.
This is the second time in three seasons that the 34-year-old has violent barrel rolled down the backstretch at Daytona International Speedway, this time in the Daytona 500, once for Stewart-Haas Racing and now RFK Racing.
The latest incident came on a crash with four laps to go and also involved Brad Keselowski, Bubba Wallace, Kyle Larson and Daniel Suarez. It’s a concerning trend with this generation of car that has increasingly shown a tendency to blow over at tracks a mile and larger.
NASCAR has tried to thwart that tendency with aerodynamic adjustments like shark fins on both sides of the car but nothing has worked yet.
Preece said he doesn’t want to become any worse of an example that he already is with something that needs to be changed.
“I don’t know what the right thing to say right now is,” Preece said. “But I think the thing I want to say as a father as a racer is, we keep beating on a door hoping for a different result, and I think we know where there’s a problem. It’s superspeedways. So, I don’t want to be the example of, when it finally does get somebody, I don’t want it to be me. I’ve got a two-year-old daughter … Something needs to be done. Because cars lifting off the ground like that, it felt, honestly, worse than (2023) Daytona.”
That crash left him with a black eye due to the g-forces and rollover but wasn’t visibly worser for wear in this one. But he says this was worse.
“Everything about it. I mean, everything about it,” Preece said. “The airborne, heading towards the fence, it’s not a good place to be in. So, honestly, with a hit like that, a head-on impact, I don’t really think it should have gone airborne, right? Not very happy but ultimately I think the thing I want to say is we had a really fast car. We could only do so much.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
