As long as NASCAR has been racing, cars have been wrecking. And as the NASCAR Cup Series returns to the track this weekend at Talladega Superspeedway, no track has the ability to produce more chaos than the 2.66-mile high-banked behemoth.
No wrecks are more terrifying than when a stock car leaves the racing surface and goes into the air, and that’s the topic of a special mid-week edition of NASCAR Inside the Race hosted by Steve Letarte.
Joining Letarte on Inside the Race is Dr. Eric Jacuzzi, NASCAR’s vice president of vehicle performance innovation aero, who walks through three unique wrecks in the Next Gen era when a car has gone into the air — and explains how NASCAR’s best attempts at keeping the car grounded sometimes get overruled by the laws of science.
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Michigan was the site of one of the airborne incidents highlighted by Letarte and Jacuzzi on Thursday’s episode. During last year’s Cup race, Corey LaJoie spun down the backstretch and flipped upside down, sliding hundreds of feet on his lid before finally landing on all four wheels in the grass near Turn 3. That incident, according to Jacuzzi, was primarily due to a strong headwind that pushed the car into the air when LaJoie spun.
Letarte and Jacuzzi also analyzed Ryan Preece’s airborne crashes at Daytona International Speedway in 2023 and 2025, both of which had separate causes. (You can see the full interview with Jacuzzi below.)
“We spent a lot of time looking at this. … When Ryan’s car crossed from the track, it hit the lip of the bus-stop chicane, which was protruding about 2 inches. So we had a pretty significant tire mark there and a chunk of asphalt missing,” Jacuzzi said of the horrifying Preece wreck in the 2023 Daytona summer race.
“The other part … I went and looked at some helicopter research and when you hover a helicopter over pavement, the engine power is let’s say ‘100.’ When you move over to grass you need ‘120’ or ‘130’ — I believe it was 30% more power. That’s because of that surface. To me, it makes a lot of sense that the grass, we would have lost some of that downforce we had.”
Jacuzzi also revealed that NASCAR is in the final stages of developing a new aerodynamical device intended to decrease the chances of airborne crashes at high-speed tracks, such as Daytona, Talladega, Atlanta and Michigan.
A new flap added to the A-post on the Next Gen car may debut beginning with the August race at Daytona. The flap is expected to increase the chances of a car staying on the ground in a 90-degree spin by 40 to 50%, Jacuzzi said.
After months of testing, the new flap hit the track for the first time when three Cup Series teams participated in a Goodyear tire test at Michigan earlier this month.
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“It started out as a concept that wasn’t really viable, and then we had a couple brainstorms and sort of came up with this idea,” Jacuzzi told Letarte. “It proved to be very, very effective.”
By adding the additional flap, the goal is to decrease lift in the early part of the spin and ultimately reduce the amount of airborne crashes.
“We think that the less lift that we can have on the car early in the spin, that’s more tire contact with the ground, more slowing it down, which is all good for us,” Jacuzzi said.