As the Daytona 500 roared on Sunday, Kyle Busch began his recovery at a local hospital after his nasty crash into an unprotected concrete wall a day earlier.
His wife Samantha Tweeted out a photo of the two of them (and their little dog, too) huddling on his bed at the Halifax Medical Center as they prepared to watch the race from there.
Busch had surgery to repair a fractured right leg, but will not have his broken left foot tended to until after returning home to the Charlotte, N.C. area, car owner Joe Gibbs said Sunday morning.
Saturday, the 29-year-old Busch, winner of 29 Sprint Cup races, was sent through the grass infield and into a low barrier wall in Turn One eight laps from the finish of the Xfinity Series warm-up to the Daytona 500.
Matt Crafton, a two-time truck-series champion and fellow Toyota driver, took Busch’s place Sunday, rushed into his first Daytona 500. Crafton finished a respectable 18th.
With his star driver facing a lengthy rehab, Gibbs did not speculate on the longer-term future for the No. 18 car. “I think we’re just going to pray for him to bounce back,” the owner said. “I can tell you this, Kyle’s already (saying), ‘Hey, I just want to get back to racing.’ He has a great spirit about things like that.”
After the crash, Daytona International Speedway president Joie Chitwood admitted the track had failed in not installing “soft wall” protection to that interior wall. For Sunday’s race, the track erected a tire barrier along the wall until it could get to a more permanent solution.
The incident earned at least one fairly stern I-told-you-so from defending Sprint Cup champion Kevin Harvick.
“I hit the same wall a little further up, last year, at this particular race and kind of voiced my opinion. Unfortunately I was just a ‘dot’ on the chart and there was no reaction,” Harvick said.
“The race tracks have to be proactive,” he added. “They have to look ahead and look for accidents that might happen.”
Junior hard on himself: Defending 500 champion Dale Earnhardt Jr. looked to have one of the strongest cars once more Sunday. He led 32 laps, and ran up near the front all day. But all it took was a miscalculation on a yellow flag restart with 20 laps left to get him out of the Daytona draft and to shuffle him back in the field. He left himself no excuses.
“My guys gave me the best car. I should have won,” he said.
Just motor on, son: On the flip side of Joey Logano's victory was the curious failure of two of his Penske Racing teammates. Both Brad Keselowski and Ryan Blaney had engines fail them during the race. If there was any growing concern that the problem would spread to Logano, Roger Penske wanted to quash it. When Logano during the race asked what happened to his teammates, Penske was quick to refocus his young driver. "I realized that there were 13 Fords in the race and two of them had a problem, so our chances were good that we would be fine," Penske said. "I said to Joey (on the radio) to just keep his focus out the window, there was nothing else to do."
Misc.: NASCAR's new high-tech pit row monitoring system was unveiled Sunday, and the result was 21 pit lane violations. The highest-profile casualty was six-time Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, forced to take a penalty pass through pit row after one of his crewman jumped the wall early during a stop. This could be a big factor all season…Tony Stewart, caught up in an early wreck, remained winless through 17 Daytona 500s. He tried to nurse the car around the track afterward, but eventually retired to the garage with a 42nd-place finish. It was his fourth finish of 40th or worse in this marquee event. "We ran as many laps as we could," Stewart told reporters afterward. "We couldn't run any more laps and gain anything. It's the biggest race of the year, and the last thing you want to do is stay out there and have something else happen to get in the middle of something. Let's just let those guys have their day."… By at least one crass monetary measure, interest in this Daytona 500 was high. According to Forbes, the average ticket price on the "secondary market" (ticket agencies not affiliated with the Speedway) for this race was $358, more than $80 higher than a year ago.
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