It took 115 laps, but The Big One finally arrived at The Dega. Bubba Wallace in the lead was the first victim, and then ripples of the first contact spread across the grid, catching at least 26 cars. 

Bubba Wallace was in the lead, being followed by Ross Chastain, who changed his line from the inside to the middle, and the #23 23XI driver covered the move before a bump to his left rear by Chastain sent Wallace up track, where he got caught up as multiple cars hit him. 

Big smoke covered the back straight as cars kept colliding with multiple cars spinning onto the grass. While the various levels of damage were being assessed on the cars, Joey Logano and Bubba Wallace were the first to hit the showers.

Ty Gibbs, William Byron, Bubba Wallace, Ryan Blaney, Cole Custer, Joey Logano, Josh Berry, and Kyle Larson all ended up with DNFs beside their names. 

Tyler Reddick was one of the first few drivers to come out of the smoke with a severely scratched front bumper. Ross Chastain, whose contact sent Wallace into a spin, ended up finishing 1st at the end of Stage 2.

Wallace, speaking to Fox, said, “Hate it for the team. Don’t want to have any DNFs, we have 2 now, so that's a bummer. But we gotta figure out how to be pushed better.” Wallace said on pushing,  “I take responsibility for that. We’ll have a good debrief and figure out what we can do to make our Toyotas a little bit better, being pushed.”

Drivers Hint at Fuel Saving as Big One Triggers

Fuel savings have long been the concern of NASCAR for races at Superspeedways, and the stages were flipped specifically for that reason in Talladega. Despite that, teams attempted to save fuel, and the pack ended up bunched up, leading to the anticipated chaos that broke out. 

Wallace and Logano both said that fuel saving could have been the reason for the crash. Speaking after his race ended, Logano said, “It’s frustrating. I felt like I had a pretty solid car. I mean, it’s kind of in the spot where I wanted to be, have my teammate around me there, and I thought I was in an okay spot.”

Logano then said, “And yeah. What do you want? Save fuel or crash? Pick one. That’s what it feels like right now.”

Wallace was asked if it was the fuel saving and then pushing later was more on the driver or the car, to which he said, It’s 50-50 before he spoke about the speeds they were going at and said, “I mean, we go from 50 per cent throttle to 30 per cent throttle to 100 per cent throttle.”

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Written by

Debrup Chaudhuri

Edited by

Suyashdeep Sason