Watch Half A Field Of Mazda MX-5 Cup Cars Wreck

This weekend, the 2025 circuit racing season gets underway with the 24 Hours of Daytona, but before the field of Hypercars and GT3 racers gets out onto the famous banking, there’s some support racing to be done.

This includes the Mazda MX-5 Cup, which is what it sounds like – a one-make series using near-standard Mazda MX-5s. This, as you’d imagine, almost always results in spectacularly close racing.

Daytona’s an interesting track for them, because as well as wiggling in and out of the infield, the Sports Car Course makes use of almost all of the high-banked speedway sections used by NASCAR.

This leads to low-downforce cars like MX-5s acting out a kind of cuter, slower version of a NASCAR oval race, bump-drafting their way around the Floridian speedway. Or in the case of the second of two 2025 races, having their very own NASCAR-style Big One incident at the very beginning of the race.

The incident begins when the 35-car field is tightly bunched together for a rolling start. As the green flag drops, the blue number 27 car lining up in fifth place gets a bit eager on the throttle, immediately rubbing up against the rear bumper of the number 33 ahead of it. The pack’s barely crossed the start line when this contact sends the #33 spearing off to the right, collecting the car beside it and sending both off into the barrier.

It’s when the pair bounce back into the path of the rest of the field that all hell breaks loose. A chain reaction ensues, with very few cars making it through the carnage unscathed. 17 cars – almost half the entire field – were caught up in the chaos, with 15 retiring.

It’s reminiscent of the kind of high-speed wrecks that happen in NASCAR superspeedway races, but in slow motion and with fewer scary airborne flips. The driver of the #27, rookie Helio Meza, was handed a drive-through penalty for his role in causing the pile-up.

Most importantly, it seems that everyone involved in the carnage is okay, and despite a significantly reduced field, a properly exciting race still ensued. If you do one thing for yourself in 2025, make it watching the MX-5 Cup – it’s all live-streamed on YouTube, so what’s stopping you?