Crashes Dominate Practice for 500

On the eve of the Budweiser Duels, it's not really the time to tear up your stuff.

But, early in practice on Wednesday for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, several of them did.

Cole Whitt had a tire go down early in the session and slapped the wall, and Brian Vickers went down to avoid the Swan Racing car. In doing so, he contacted Casey Mears, spun and hit the wall nose-first. Vickers will go to a backup car for Thursday.

Later, Matt Kenseth was in the middle, moved down then back up, hitting Joey Logano in the process. Logano spun sideways and collected Parker Kligerman in the second Swan Racing machine, Dave Blaney, Ryan Truex, Trevor Bayne and Paul Menard.

According to reports, only Kenseth and Bayne emerged relatively unscathed. Logano, Blaney, Truex and Menard will all go to backups.

It was a bad day for Swan Racing, with both cars torn up. Kligerman wound up on his lid, and the latter crash tore up the catch fence on the front straight. Some of the fencing was torn out, but the posts did their job and held up.

The rest of the session was cancelled for the day due to the damage.

"The 22 was just being overaggressive," Kligerman said. "He's supposed to be a veteran, but he's racing people like it's the end of the Daytona 500."

Logano had a somewhat different view.

“We were coming off four there and the 20 started making a move to go down," he said. "I assumed he was gonna go down there.  I had the run, so I was gonna fill that hole and then he started to come back up and I was there.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been racing as hard as I was there in practice, but everybody was in a big pack there trying to make things happen.  As soon as he came back up I checked up a little bit and then the 21 hit me from behind and we spun out.  It happens.  That’s Daytona for you."

Logano said this kind of thing happens a lot at Daytona.

“It happens every year.  You always hope you’re the one that’s not in it or you miss it.  I saw it getting kind of crazy out there and you’re kind of in the middle of it and you can’t really get out of it at that point when you’re in the middle.  It was a little too late. We’re all out there trying to learn about our car and put our car in spots to try to learn about what we can do to make it better and that’s what happens.” 

Menard was just thankful everyone was OK.

"Fortunately, Parker is OK, and nobody in the stands was hurt. That could have been a lot worse," he said.