Early crashes shake up NASCAR Cup at Talladega

The long expected fuel conservation played out exactly as anticipated during the first stage of the Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway and contributed to a Lap 43 crash.

The incident eliminated Brad Keselowski and Ryan Blaney from contention. Kyle Busch received damaged but continued. The crash began when Keselowski veered into Busch, both cars steering up the track and into Alex Bowman, before collecting Blaney.

“It was just a stack of guys trying to come to pit road as fast as they could and we were kind of the ham in the sandwich that got squeezed,” Keselowski said. “I waved down the backstretch to let everybody know I was gonna pit and I came off of four and everybody was so tight behind me that I didn’t even have a chance to turn left.  I hate that it ruined not just our day, but several other people’s day.  I don’t think I could do anything different.”

Blaney at first thought he might be able to continue but his Penske No. 12 was too damaged.

“We just broke too many pieces in the right-rear,” Blaney said. “That took all the damage.  The right-rear wheel and it broke everything.  We couldn’t fix it, unfortunately, but I don’t really know.  I kind of saw a little bit of a replay. It looked like a group of guys trying to get to pit road and maybe some guys not knowing that they were coming to pit road and not giving them any room.

“I saw the 8 and 6 kind of get hooked together and they were going up the track, so I kind of picked the bottom and tried to get out of there and I think they clipped someone outside of them and the 6 came back into me and I got clipped in the right-rear.  Oh gosh, man, another DNF.  It just sucks.  Just when we were kind of getting our momentum and didn’t even get to race today.  We’ll just move on to Texas.”

This continues a nightmare start to the season for Keselowski who entered the 31st in the standings. He is the 2012 champion but is off to a crash-filled worst start to his career and absolutely must win one of the next 16 races in order to make the playoffs.

How does he begin to right the ship?

“Just show up again next week.”

On the ensuing restart, a Denny Hamlin push up front on teammate Christopher Bell triggered a big crash that also involved Chris Buescher.

Bell and Buescher had pretty significant impacts.

“Everything was great out the windshield,” Buescher said. “I have no clue what happened yet.  I imagine it was a bad push.  That’s all it can really be.  I know we’re all going for it there at the end.  We’re in a great spot with our Travel Centers Ford Mustang.  We had our teammate behind us.

“We had fuel to go wide-open and not worry about it all the way to the end of that stage and it certainly didn’t work out.  I don’t know what happened at this point.  I’m assuming we were just two-wide.  I have no clue to really say, but we had worked really well with Preece early on in the race and had been really smart about how we linked up and got to pushing and it worked really well for us.  We were right there off the corner, just kind of backing up to him to receive that first big push down the back and just seen the 20 come across the nose.  Until I dive into it, I don’t know anything else yet.”

Bell was adamant that Hamlin didn’t do anything wrong -- saying ’you have to push here’ several times to illustrate his point.

“Denny's a very experienced driver,” Buescher said. “He knows what's going on. And you have to push, like, I can't say that enough that you have to push to be successful. And it's just Russian Roulette every time you get on the racetrack here. If you're that lead car, you better hope that the guy behind you takes care of you.”

Both Buescher and Bell conceded hard hits but also said they felt okay.