This is what every NASCAR Cup Series championship contender worried about in having an extra superspeedway race in the playoffs and starting the first race in the first round.
Running third near the end of the first stage, top seeded Kyle Larson suddenly broke loose and crashed hard right into the wall and was drilled by lower seeded contender Chase Briscoe.
“I’m OK,” Larson said after exiting the infield care center. “Thankfully everything held up well inside of the car. That was a huge hit. I’m not really sure, like, what caused it. I was actually sort of like tight loaded in the corner. That was pretty far out the corner and stepped out. I don’t know. It just all happened really fast.”
The crash will use up a vast majority of the points advantage Larson had earned over the regular season while Briscoe will be forced into another must-win scenario over the next two weeks, not unlike the one he overcame to make the playoffs in the first place last week in the Southern 500.
“That’s NASCAR. You can be on top one week and you can be at the very bottom of the mountain the next week,” Briscoe said. “It’s unfortunate. I thought our car was an adjustment away from being pretty good. We weren’t very good at all balance-wise and I still felt like I was able to kind of run right there around the seventh to 12th place guys. I was watching my outside getting into one because somebody kept trying to get to my outside and was probably a little late just trying to see the 5 car wrecking.
“I didn’t expect anybody to wreck because they weren’t really two-wide, and then I saw the smoke and tried slowing down. I knew he was coming down the racetrack and just kept trying to feed the thing left and slow it down and I couldn’t get left quick enough and then he kind of started sliding back down the track at the very last minute, so I tried to turn back right to avoid him and just KO’d him. It was a big hit. One of the biggest hits I’ve had in a long time. I’m glad I’m alright and we just have to go win. That’s what we had to do at Darlington and I know we’re capable of doing it again, so we’ll just have to go to Watkins Glen and Bristol and try to do the same.”
Larson will finish 37th and Briscoe will finish 38th and both finish with just one point earned.
Larson also has no idea what caused it.
“There was no warning at all,” Larson said. “If anything, I was getting tighter and tighter. Yeah, It just caught me way off guard. I was never once, even in that same corner, like loose. It Just started stepping out and I over-corrected and yeah, just over-corrected.”