NASCAR Senior Vice President of Competition Scott Miller addressed several topics on Tuesday‘s Morning Drive on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio after the season-opening national series events at Daytona International Speedway. Among them were the wheels NASCAR confiscated from Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing and Team Penske, the loose wheel for the No. 50 Cup car and the No. 21 of Harrison Burton getting airborne during a wreck in the Daytona 500.
For all three of these items, Miller said investigations were ongoing and that news was expected to be forthcoming after those examinations were completed, in addition to discussions between NASCAR and the teams and drivers involved.
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On Friday at Daytona, NASCAR confiscated wheels from RFK Racing and Team Penske and took them back to the NASCAR R&D Center in Concord, North Carolina, for further investigation.
“We have some meetings with vendors and other team folks and analyzing deeper what we saw there,” Miller said to SiriusXM on Tuesday. “You‘ll be hearing some more about that later in the week I‘m sure. And honestly, it‘s just one of those things that is really another one of the learning processes of what needs to be. Some people thought something needed to be one way, and others another. It‘s the newness of it all, and we‘re continuing to dig in.”
Notably, the Next Gen car uses larger 18-inch aluminum wheels manufactured by German wheel-maker BBS. Those wheels use a single, center-locking lug nut instead of the five-lug pattern of the former 15-inch wheels.
As for the No. 50 Chevrolet driven by Kaz Grala that lost a wheel during Stage 1 of the Daytona 500, Miller said wheels coming off is a serious matter and the news about what happens with The Money Team Racing will be included with the other wheel revelations later. But a four-race suspension for crew chief Tony Eury Jr. is possible based on NASCAR‘s new deterrence policy.
Finally, Burton‘s car, the No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing Ford, got airborne and went upside down during a wreck late in Stage 1 when Brad Keselowski‘s No. 6 RFK Racing Ford made contact from behind and turned Burton‘s car, which took additional contact from other cars before turning upside down and then landing on its wheels. Burton was checked and released from the infield care center and walked away from the wreck under his own power.
“We have to look at what led up to creating that,” Miller said. “Every one of those situations when a car gets hit, the angle it gets hit, the angle it is going backwards when it gets hit, contributes a lot to the learnings for us. … We had a lot of other cars spin around at speed with no contact that did the job exactly as designed. When there‘s contact involved that‘s a big variable so it‘s something we study with the safety team and learn from.”