Whether it was the extra horsepower, gained from the larger restrictor plate, the return of the spoiler or just the bumpy surface of the 2.5 mile Daytona International Speedway there was mayhem on the Super Speedway.
Twelve cars, including all three Joe Gibbs Racing teams, were involved in crashes in practice for Saturday night’s Sprint Cup race. The Sprint Cup drivers crashed in the heat of the afternoon and in the cooling evening. Crew chiefs and fabricators were grateful when the evening session was halted for rain. Even before practice started veteran, Jeff Burton, predicted “Well, with this restrictor plate, you are really going to be smokin’ going into the corners here and it is going to be really hard to get your car to handle the way you want it to. That is really the focus today is to get the car handling like we need it to. If we do that, things will work out.”
But things didn’t work out for many. Some were innocent. Others took the blame. Kyle Busch was involved in accidents in both practice sessions. The biggest incident involved five cars in the evening. "I misjudged it and tried to get back in line a little bit too fast," Busch said of his run-in with Hamlin. "This one here was all my fault.” Tony Stewart and Reed Sorenson were involved in that incident. "Kyle just misjudged it by a hair, and it caused a wreck," Hamlin said. "He's already in a backup, and we're having to go to a backup....so it's lucky his (backup) car wasn't damaged.” Rookie, Robert Richardson, Jr. was also involved "Denny Hamlin got in the outside wall and came across and got me, and then I ended up getting Tony and it was all over from there. It was a pretty wild wreck, but we’ll get our back-up car out and see what we can do tomorrow.” Earlier Carl Edwards made contact with a slowing Joey Logano. As Edwards said “He was just slowing down to come into the pits and he came off the line a little bit. I couldn’t go to the outside and I couldn’t go to the inside, so I just hit him. I’m glad he didn’t hit the wall and it didn’t tear up our car very much at all, so no harm, no foul.” Robby Gordon was fastest in practice
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