Watch NASCAR's Pace Car Crash Mid-Race

As with much of the NASCAR Cup Series in 2024, this year’s championship decider at Phoenix Raceway was not without chaos and controversy. It was all going fine at first – until the safety car, inexplicably and without contact from another car, swerved left at pit entry and somehow ended up stacked into the barriers.

The pace car (safety car for those of us who speak proper English) was intending to peel into the pitlane before a restart leaving Chase Elliot and Christopher Bell to lead the field away for the remaining 244 laps. Simple right? Clearly not.

The pitlane entry at Pheonix is uniquely sharp on account of the track’s tri-oval layout, though considering that just 60 laps ago that same driver and car had led the race’s rolling start without issue it only makes the incident more bizarre.  As you probably know, safety cars exist primarily to act upon their namesake, to bring the field together at low speed as a mechanism for race control to clear up debris and stricken cars.

In this case, though, it was brought out due to NASCAR’s stage system in which ‘competition yellows’ are brought out at intervals to bring the field back together. The crash necessitated a 5-minute 47-second red flag period for cleanup of the entry barrier and the Need For Speed style yellow water barrels that had been suitably crushed before the pace car driver trundled back to race control. 

Prior comparable incidents exist in the history books, though few are quite as silly as last night's. One that this writer fondly recollects is this moment when a retired Dale Jr was invited back to drive the pace car before being rather impolitely thwacked by old rival Kyle Busch as he led the field to green.

We also occasionally see drivers in open-wheel motorsports crash under these conditions as they spin their wheels to warm up cold tyres or lose control under slippery conditions - think Franco Colapinto during F1’s Sau Paulo GP last weekend, young George Russell’s 90-degree spin at the 2020 race at Imola. Even experienced safety car helmsman Bernd Mayländer suffered a safety car crash this year in Monza, though this was due to a brake failure that was intentionally mitigated by putting the car into a spin at the Parabolica corner. 

In this instance, the reactions from teams and drivers matched the comedy of the incident itself as they pondered whether the safety car could be legally allowed to be repaired and subsequently re-entered into the race without breaching the sports regulations and if honorary starter Michael Phelps in the passenger seat had caused the incident. Driver and team owner Denny Hamlin’s summation of the incident encapsulated many of the audience's reactions as he relayed to his team that ‘This is just so NASCAR.’

After leading for much of the race Joey Logano took both the race and championship win after the chequered flag fell in Pheonix, marking his third Cup Series championship win with the No. 22 Team Penske Ford. The series officially returns, after two pre-season warmup rounds, with the season-opening 2025 Daytona 500 on February 16th.