I doubt many of you saw the finish of NASCAR’s Coke Zero 400 race at Daytona International Speedway, which due to a three-and-one-half hour rain delay ended at 2:41 a.m. Monday morning, July 6th. More likely you saw the highlight, if you can call it that, on ESPN, which probably showed it a hundred times.
Just after crossing the finish line in seventh place, racer Austin Dillon’s #3 Chevrolet SS, roaring home at 200 MPH in a tight pack of stock cars inches away from each other, got caught up in a collision of two cars in front of him. In the huge chain reaction crash that followed, Dillon’s car went airborne, sailing almost upside-down over two cars and smashing into a 22-foot high catch fence, which like a slingshot sent Dillon’s 3,200-pound car flying back across the track, landing on its roof. Then another car that couldn’t slow down smashed into Dillon’s wreckage. His smoldering engine block lay on the track yards away.