Ryan Preece expressed a great deal of dissatisfaction about the circumstances around his car repeatedly catching fire on Sunday at Dover Motor Speedway.
The No. 41 Ford Mustang Dark Horse started to smoke within the first 30 laps, believing it was just rocker panel rubber build up. They pitted during the Lap 39 caution but the car again started to smoke.
“I’m not going to be the one to say what happened, but it wasn’t necessary,” Preece said after his car was retired from the race. “It could have been prevented.”
As it turns out, it was an error across all four Stewart Haas Racing cars and No. 10 crew chief for Noah Gragson detailed what happened in explaining how it could have happened to their car as well.
“That was self-inflicted,” Blickensderfer said. “That was the bolts between the headers and the collectors keeping everything together. We had some issues there amongst the teams on our side. They were not installed correctly and it was allowing the collectors to come disattached from the headers, kind of fall on that rocker box and cause an issue.
“So, it was a self-inflicted error, a little change in process that someone didn’t catch. And it was close to happening on all of our cars, to be honest with you.”
Preece was the first driver eliminated out of the race and finished 37th.
“They (the 14 team) were unfortunately the victim of it, but when we got back to the race shop all of our cars were close to having a similar issue,” Blickensderfer said. “So obviously that gets rectified quickly. Everything gets torn out of our Kansas cars and fixed. I think NASCAR has done a good job. I think us as a group, because it was more relevant for us last year or the year before, we’ve taken a lot of effort to keep that from happening.
“Knock on wood, I think we’re in a good spot with that. We just have to make sure we clean up our end to make sure the parts are installed correctly.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.