If you filled out a bracket for NASCAR’s in-season Challenge, odds are it’s now worth about as much as the twisted heap your favorite driver’s car became on Saturday night.
The first hit came on lap 58 when Christopher Bell — the spring winner here back when it was still Atlanta Motor Speedway — got loose coming out of Turn 3. Bell, the No. 4 seed, slapped the wall and collected Ryan Blaney (7th seed), Bubba Wallace (9th), Austin Dillon (28th), and Kyle Larson (10th) in the process. Bell and Blaney were done for the night. Larson somehow escaped with just a few new dents — basically winning the stock car version of roulette.
But the real chaos was still to come.
A few laps into Stage 2, on lap 69, Turn 3 turned into a demolition derby. Denny Hamlin, the No. 1 seed, got into the back of John Hunter Nemechek, and by the time the smoke settled, 29 cars were involved in one colossal pile-up.
Among them? Kyle Busch, Ross Chastain, Daniel Suarez, Josh Berry, William Byron, Austin Cindric, Joey Logano — who led 51 laps from the pole — and more. By the time NASCAR threw the red flag for the second time (the first was for rain), Turn 3 looked less like a racetrack and more like a scrapyard with pit crews desperately trying to patch cars back together.
Joey Logano, right in the middle of it, summed it up in classic fashion:
“It wrecked the whole field,” he said. “I still don’t know exactly how it started. It wasn’t the best of replays, but it was total chaos. Cars were sideways and on the brakes. I got hit from every corner possible. It’s just the crappy part of our racing sometimes.”
Logano, who had been wary even before the green flag, wasn’t exactly shocked.
“You just don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen,” he lamented. “If it goes green to the end of the stage, you’re looking good. But when that caution came out for rain, it gave everyone a chance to flip it. You know at that point you’re gonna pay the piper.”
Austin Cindric, who had won Stage 1, had a front-row seat to the chaos:
“A lot of cars wrecking in the middle of the straightaway — here you kind of expect it more in the corners. I had a small chance to get through a gap, but obviously it didn’t work out. It’s a shame for everybody at Team Penske bringing such fast cars and all of them wreck out.”
Josh Berry, was also caught in the mess, probably spoke for fans with wrecked brackets everywhere:
“Everybody thought they had it figured out, but they weren’t planning on that.”
In the end, only three cars managed to limp back onto the track, most looking like they’d been built from leftovers in the junk pile. For everyone else — drivers, teams, and fans clutching busted brackets — it was an early, bitter end to the night.
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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