Last Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, Kyle Larson experienced a wild barrel-roll down the backstretch on the final lap.
On Friday, Larson got to see the incident from another point of view— the in-car camera in his No. 42 Chip Ganassi Racing Chevrolet, as NASCAR continued to study the reasons for the liftoff and how to prevent it in the future.
“Yeah, I’ve got a lot of confidence in NASCAR,” Larson said on Friday at Dover International Speedway. “I’ve been involved in some big crashes. It seems like, with any crash I’ve been in or that other drivers have been in, they’ve made improvements from them and made the cars safer and all that.
“So yeah, they have a lot of smart people in the safety area of their business. I’m confident that they’ll look at it and make improvements from it.”
Larson also had an amusing takeaway from watching the video of the incident.
“It makes me feel like I’m really tough,” he quipped. “Yeah, it’s pretty crazy how much everything stretches. My seat belts, my harness, everything stretch with an impact like that. So, I stretched far enough that my head hit the steering wheel a little bit.
“And with each tumble, just the jolts that my body went through was pretty crazy to see. And then you slow it down and look at how the chassis is flexing when it makes contact with the pavement, it’s pretty incredible. We’re driving heavy vehicles. So, for it to hold up as well as it did was pretty amazing.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" 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, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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