NASCAR addresses the fire at Darlington Raceway
On Sunday, the NASCAR Cup Series opened the 2022 playoffs in Darlington, South Carolina. Darlington Raceway hosted the Southern 500.
In stage three, playoff driver Kevin Harvick caught fire. He attempted to keep racing. After several laps, the fire breached the cockpit.
The driver was forced to come to a stop. That’s when the flames took off. Harvick was able to climb from the machine without injury but with pure frustration.
No contact led to the fire. It appears to have been started just from rubber buildup.
Hear from NASCAR after the fire below.
“They haven’t fixed anything. We just let it keep going and keep going,” Harvick said in frustration after the fire.
Harvick added, “What a disaster. For no reason! We didn’t touch the wall, we didn’t touch a car and here we are in the pits with a burned up car and can’t finish the race during the playoffs because of crappy ass parts.”
Kevin Harvick blames crappy parts for NASCAR fire at Darligton (Video)
Kevin Harvick’s crew chief Rodney Childers mirrored his driver’s statements, “Issues like this could be fixed really quick, if the teams had control over their own cars. But, with spec cars, there are lots of red tape and layers in getting problems solved.”
Kevin Harvick’s crew chief vocal on NASCAR fire; Deletes tweets
NASCAR comments on the Next Gen fire
“We’re certainly digging into the cause,” Scott Miller said Tuesday morning via Sirius XM NASCAR radio.
“We have cars down (at NASCAR’s R&D Center) this morning looking for any signs of anything that may have triggered that. And you know, we have done so all year.”
“I mean, there’s a lot of rubber at Darlington, the ‘cheese grater’ that we always talk about, so we’re not certain if rubber getting into the rocker box was the problem or not, but we’re debriefing it all.”
“It’s unacceptable for the cars to catch on fire and we’ve been working on different solutions for different problems, different things along the way that seem to maybe be the trigger and obviously we still have work to do.”
“We’re looking at clearances on particularly the Ford exhaust because they seem to have been having a little bit more trouble with this than the others,” Miller said.
“So there’s just there’s a lot of work going on, a lot of collaboration within the industry to get to the bottom of it, and we have to get to the bottom of it quick obviously. It’s all hands on deck with the teams and the OEMs.”
Watch the Kevin Harvick fire video
