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Nasty Wreck in Nascar Sprint Cup Practice at Daytona

Around 4:15pm there was a small wreck in Nascar Sprint Cup practice at Daytona.  About 15 minutes later, there was a BIG wreck in that same practice session.  Below is footage of the wreck (not mine, and only shown for illustrative purposes)--quality is pretty low-end, but you get an idea what it actually looked like:




The first, smaller wreck involved the 26 (Cole Whitt), 55 (Brian Vickers), and 13 (Casey Mears) cars, as well as, incidentally, Jeff Gordon (see below).  The second wreck involved the 22 (Joey Logano), 27 (Paul Menard), 77 (Dave Blaney), 30 (Parker Kligerman, who got the worst of it), and 83 (Ryan Truex) cars, as well as incidental contact from Matt Kenseth and Trevor Bayne.
via Nascar.com & Alex Cavanna
The worst part of the second wreck was the 30 car going into the catch-fence a la Kyle Larson last year.  Portions of the chain-link part of the fence were destroyed, while a splitter (and other, much-smaller debris) went into the walkway between the fence and the grandstands.  Thankfully, nobody was hurt (fans or drivers).
Three things I never saw happen happened in the process:
1. When the first, smaller wreck happened, Brian Vickers' car lost a roof-flap…which promptly flew like a throwing-star into Jeff Gordon's grill.  Looks like the 24 crew will be able to fix the damage.
2. As you see, during the second wreck, one of Fox's cameras got taken out by the 30 car.  You'd figure that would happen much more often than it does.
3. As a result of the back-to-back wrecks, some teams are low on cars.  Swan Racing only had one backup for two teams, so the 30 car will get the backup, while the 26 will have to be repaired.  Also, the 77 team says they do not have a superspeedway car ready for tomorrow's Budweiser Duels, so they may have to "wheel and deal" to get a race-ready car in the next 24 hours.
Thankfully, of course, everybody is OK, and tomorrow we can all go back to complaining about the on-screen ticker.