Sunday the high-speed, nerve-shredding chess match that is the NASCAR Cup series did what Talladega always does when everyone gets just a little too clever at 190 mph, it detonated.
At Talladega Superspeedway, subtlety is a myth. You can spend a stage fuel-saving like a Sunday driver in the right lane, carefully plotting your rise to the front, only for the whole thing to unravel in a blink. And on Lap 115, it did. Spectacularly.
The result was a red flag, a silence broken only by the slow, almost funereal parade of tow trucks dragging away what used to be race cars. Among them: the battered machines of Kyle Larson, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney and Bubba Wallace—all victims of a crash that didn’t just shake up the race, it rewrote it entirely.
What triggered it was almost mundane by Talladega standards. Wallace, leading the pack, took a push from Ross Chastain down the backstretch. The kind of push you need. The kind of push you ask for. The kind of push that occasionally ends your afternoon.
This one did.
Wallace’s No. 23 snapped sideways toward the outside wall, right in front of a tightly packed, three-wide freight train with nowhere to go and no time to think. In an instant, the air filled with tire smoke, carbon fiber confetti, and the unmistakable sense that a very large number of people were about to have a very bad day.
By the time it settled, at least 24 cars were caught up in what will go down as one of the more ambitious “Big Ones” Talladega has produced. William Byron, Kyle Busch, Ty Gibbs, Daniel Suárez and a small army of others were either collected, damaged, or simply relieved to escape with something resembling a race car.
Wallace, understandably, kept it simple.
“Got wrecked there, unfortunately,” he said. “Our Xfinity Toyota Camry was a little unstable getting pushed, but manageable. Maybe that hard of a hit was too much, so unfortunately, we wiped out a bunch of cars… We will put this one behind us and go on to Texas and have some fun.”
Larson, who had already endured a day of strategy headaches before the crash, sounded like a man who knew exactly how this movie ends, because he’s seen it before.
“There was a big stack-up and I was just in the middle of it,” Larson said. “It was a bummer for this No. 5 Valvoline Chevrolet team… It was starting to get hairy there at the start of the stage, so I wasn’t surprised to get wrapped up in that crash. It’s just an unfortunate end to the day.”
Logano, meanwhile, described the moment with the kind of resignation usually reserved for people watching a piano fall from a great height.
“They just started wrecking above me,” he said. “You’re kind of seeing it happen and hope they stay up there… The wreck started moving down the hill and there we were. That’s Talladega… We got maybe 10 or 12 laps of racing in before we wrecked.”
And that might be the most telling line of all.
Because for all the strategy, fuel saving, lane management, timing the runs, this race had only just begun to actually race when it all went wrong.
Blaney summed up the physics lesson masquerading as motorsport.
“We all just kind of got nose bumper tag there,” he said. “You’re trying to lift and stabilize it… and the 23 ended up getting turned in front of everybody… There’s no bubble. You’re just ramming through the guy in front of you.”
Which, in the end, is Talladega in a sentence.
Byron, caught in the aftermath, was left picking up the pieces—literally.
“I was just trying to get slowed down so I didn’t get any major impacts,” he said. “It didn’t feel like I hit that hard, but somebody got me in the right-front and I got damage to the suspension… It’s a bummer, but we’ll regroup and get ready for Texas next weekend.”
And that’s the cruel punchline.
Hours of patience, inches of precision, and one slightly overzealous push later, half the field is on a flatbed, the race is reset, and Talladega, grinning like it always does, reminds everyone who’s actually in charge.
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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