Daytona 500 under fire after airborne driver begs not to ‘be the example’

With just eight laps remaining in the 2025 Daytona 500, driver Ryan Preece found himself airborne — again. As his cockpit fell silent, “all I thought about was my daughter.”

Preece isn’t the only NASCAR Cup Series driver to find himself suddenly swept up into the air since the arrival of the Next-Gen car, but he is the most recent as well as the driver with two similar crashes within as many years. He was able to climb out of the car, but he warned NASCAR that “we’re getting really close to somebody not being able to.”

NASCAR’s Next-Gen car takes flight at the Daytona 500

When the FOX broadcast replayed the in-car footage from the No. 60 Ford, the fear in Ryan Preece’s eyes was clear even behind his helmet, and it was easy to imagine him saying, “Not again.”

With eight laps left in the 2025 Daytona 500, the No. 20 of Christopher Bell got loose after taking a big push from the No. 41 of Cole Custer — a “racing incident,” Bell said after leaving the care center, caused perhaps by the fact that just about every car in the field had sustained damage as the field jockeyed for position.

Those kinds of racing incidents are common in NASCAR, but there’s another kind of accident that’s been cropping up with frightening regularity: The flyover.

When Bell lost control of his car, he was near the front of the field; the bunched-up pack couldn’t avoid him, and another multi-car accident kicked off. In the fray, the No. 43 of Erik Jones struck the side of a drifting Preece, pushing the No. 60 for several seconds.

Then, the No. 60 got airborne.

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It’s not clear exactly how it happened, but in the aftermath, Preece described the car as feeling “like a sheet of plywood.” When his car tipped just enough to allow air beneath it, that air treated the car like a sail, and off it went.

This isn’t Preece’s first time taking flight behind the wheel, either. At the summer Daytona event in 2023, Preece lost control of his No. 41, which veered in front of another driver. The second car pushed Preece’s into the air, and as his machine dug into the backstretch grass, Preece proceeded to flip multiple times.

Preece’s crash at the 2025 Daytona 500 wasn’t anywhere near as violent as the one from 2023, but it was enough for the driver to be shaken.

“When the car took off like that, it got real quiet,” he told FOX when he was released from the infield care center.

“All I thought about was my daughter, so I’m lucky to walk away, but we’re getting really close to somebody not being able to, so I’m very grateful.”

He’s referring to the fact that NASCAR’s Next-Gen machine has a concerning tendency to take flight under the wrong circumstances. At last summer’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona, Josh Berry’s car soared into the air during a wreck, cracking roof-first into the outside wall before coming to a rest upside down.

On top of that, Harrison Burton has turned upside down at the 2022 Daytona 500, and Chris Buescher faced the same issue at that year’s Coca-Cola 600.

Clearly, something is wrong.

“We keep beating on a door hoping for a different result,” Preece told media after the race.

In all fairness to NASCAR, the series attempted to rectify this flipping issue by implementing first a shark fin and then by adding flaps to certain aero components to keep the cars on the ground. Neither appear to have worked, and Preece is concerned.

He told media, “I think we know where there’s a problem at superspeedways. I don’t want to be the example of when it finally does get somebody, I don’t want it to be me.

“I’ve got a two-year-old daughter, and just like a lot of us, we have families. So something needs to be done because cars lifting off the ground like that.”

The cars that have flipped over the past few years have all been Fords.

In motorsport, safety solutions usually aren’t chased with force until it’s too late — until someone has died or been critically injured. For most of racing history, that’s been because we didn’t have the technology or resources capable of understanding the?why of crashes, so there was no point in slapping on solutions that could make the problem even worse.

But in 2025, we have those resources. It is possible to study Preece’s wreck, to recreate it virtually, to understand why it happened and to find an answer that solves the core of the issue and not just the symptoms.

It’s clear that we need more than just a few tacked-on components to keep Cup cars on the ground — especially now that we exist in an era of Cup racing where 450 miles of strategic racing can be wiped out in a series of late-race crashes where the luckiest driver, not the best driver, wins. And we need to listen to Ryan Preece when he tells us that these problems need solving, now.

During a red flag at the 2001 Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt was horrified by the Tony Stewart crash that forced a stop to the race. As he waited in his car, he radioed team boss Richard Childress and said, “Richard, they’re going to have to do something about these cars, or they’re going to get someone killed.”

Stewart was able to escape with his life — shaken, but largely uninjured after flying through the air, barrel rolling down the track, and taking a trip to the hospital — and Childress waved away Earnhardt’s warning. There was a restart to focus on. A race to win.

Before the sun had set, Dale Earnhardt was dead.

In 2025, there is no reason a problem as critical as this should remain unsolved after?years of concerns. It’s beyond time to find solutions — before a driver needs to become an “example” of how bad a flip can be.

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