Unusual circumstances led to Carl Edwards' flip
Kenny Bruce
Kenny Bruce is a three-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association's George Cunningham Writer of the Year Award. He joined Street & Smith's Sports Group in 2001.
You can be sure that NASCAR will take a close look at the circumstances surrounding Carl Edwards’ crash on the final lap of Sunday’s Aaron’s 499 at Talladega Superspeedway.
Here are at least two things that video replays of the incident, which was the result of contact with Brad Keselowski, appear to show:
• The rear of Edwards’ Ford was already turning toward the finish line when it began to lift off the racing surface. The driver’s-side roof flap deploys first, and then the passenger side flap deploys as the car continues to turn and begins to lift. The nose of the car is on the apron, but the car didn’t begin to rise off the racing surface until air picked up the rear end.
• The back end of Edwards’ car appeared to be coming back down just before it was struck by the car driven by Ryan Newman. As a result, the back end is knocked back up in the air, which results in the car being lifted completely off the ground.
Unfortunately, no amount of roof flaps, side windows, restrictor plates or other technology can guarantee that a car will stay on the ground when it's hit while traveling at such an angle at that high rate of speed. Not unless there is a way to allow air to escape from underneath the car, allowing it to settle, without damaging the integrity of those safety measures already built in.
It took an unusual set of circumstances for Edwards’ accident to occur. Maybe the lessons learned from it will prevent something similar from happening in the future.
But to think that the possibility for such an accident can be totally eliminated, under the current conditions, is foolish. Almost as foolish as
thinking there isn’t a problem in the first place.
