Watch This Scary NASCAR Flip At Daytona

Cars are not generally meant to go airborne. If they are, they’re designed to come back down on nice pillowy long-travel suspension, and crucially on all four wheels. If a car gets airborne accidentally, then, the results can be quite spectacular, as NASCAR Cup Series driver Ryan Preece discovered during the Daytona 500 on Sunday.

Preece was effectively a bystander, running towards the back of the pack with five laps to go when, with the field bunched up after a restart, Cole Custer – sitting in the second row – gave front-row runner Christopher Bell a shove from behind.

Bell’s car speared off into the wall, out of the path of the field, and when it bounced back, it was enough of the pack had filtered past for Preece to be collected. Caught between Bell’s out-of-control Toyota and the car to his left, there was nowhere for the front of Preece’s RFK Racing Ford Mustang to go but upwards. Once air got under the car, he was a passenger.

Effectively wheelieing down the rest of the back straight, the car eventually turned onto its roof before quickly righting again and bouncing up into the wall at the top of Daytona’s steep banking.

Incredibly, this isn’t the first scary flip Preece has experienced at Daytona. An arguably even wilder one during the 2023 Coke Zero Sugar 400 saw his car roll a full 10 times.

Preece was given the all-clear after both instances, but he’s increasingly vocally pushing for change in the way NASCAR cars behave when they get airborne. After Sunday’s wreck, he told reporters:

"When the car took off like that, all I thought about was my daughter… I don’t know what the right thing to say right now is, but the thing I want to say right now as a father and as a racer is we keep beating on a door hoping for a different result. We know where there’s a problem at superspeedways; I don’t want to be the example.”

This year’s Daytona 500, in its traditional spot as the first fully-fledged championship race of the NASCAR Cup season, was won by Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet driver William Byron, escaping a carnage-filled last lap to win the flagship event two years on the bounce.