There are many ways to exit the Daytona 500. You can blow an engine in a plume of expensive smoke. You can misjudge fuel and crawl to a stop like a pensioner at a crosswalk. Or, if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you can attempt to rearrange half the zip code at 200 mph.
On Sunday in the Daytona 500, Justin Allgaier chose the third option.
Allgaier, wheeling the JR Motorsports Chevy, had already flirted with disaster twice. He was caught in an early skirmish, then tangled again on lap 86. Both times, he emerged with little more than cosmetic indignity. The car still had pace. The swagger was intact. Daytona, as it often does, appeared to be granting him a third life.
By lap 125, he was at the front, elbows out, fighting for the lead like a man who’d decided subtlety was overrated. He grabbed the top spot and headed toward Turn 1 with Denny Hamlin looming in the outside lane. And then came the sort of decision that looks brilliant in your head and catastrophic everywhere else.
Allgaier moved up to block.
Whether it was a fraction-of-a-second miscalculation or Hamlin committing harder than expected is something the replay will argue about forever. What we do know is this: the gap disappeared, the air got weird, and the No. 40 was suddenly pointed in a direction not found on any Daytona brochure. He was pinched into the wall and then ricocheted back across the field like a steel-and-fiberglass pinball.
Twenty cars were collected. Twenty. That’s not an incident. That’s a census.
Allgaier’s day ended there, in a symphony of torn sheet metal and disappointed crew members. Later, to his credit, he didn’t hide behind aero theory or the ancient Daytona excuse of “that’s just superspeedway racing.” He owned it.
“Unfortunately, I’m going to have to take 100 percent of the responsibility for that one,” he said. “I hate it for everyone that got caught up in it. I felt like our No. 40 Traveller Whiskey Chevrolet was incredible all day. Greg Ives (crew chief) and this whole team have done a phenomenal job building a race car that we felt like we could come here and not only run up front, but be able to lead laps.”
He did lead laps—three of them, officially. Then they evaporated.
“I got to the top lane there and I watched the run coming on the top with Denny (Hamlin),” Allgaier explained. “I thought he was going to push. I thought the lane was closed up just enough that he wouldn’t try to go up there, but when I realized he was going up there, it was just too late. Once the air kind of got on the spoiler, it just turned me to the right. I hate it for everyone that got caught up in it because it wasn’t what we wanted.”
That’s Daytona. You can build the perfect car, execute the perfect strategy, and survive the first two punches. But throw one late block in the wrong zip code, and the place will happily introduce you—and 19 of your closest friends—to the wall.
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, and a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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