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[/media-credit]Alex Bowman (pictured) was the fastest car in practice, however he was one of the ten drivers involved on lap 11 of the International Motorsports Hall of Fame 250 at Talladega Superspeedway.
The wreck started when Steve Blackburn went for a spin after contact from Brennan Poole, causing a chain reaction that collected the eight other drivers.
One of the drivers involved in the wreck was Bobby Gerhart, who has eight top 10s in 15 Talladega starts and is known for solely focusing on his Superspeedway program.
“Jason Jebb just notified me that there was a spin on the bottom and then got blocked up and there wasn’t too much I could do. I just got caught up there,” he says.
Gerhart had just radioed his guys telling them that he was going to ride after the car had gotten hot from racing closely.
“We had a really, really good car that sucked up real well,” he says. “But in this heat, you couldn’t do it for long.”
Another driver involved in the wreck was NASCAR Camping World Truck Series regular Joey Coulter, who was driving for the family owned team.
“I hate it for Rip It; that’s two races in a row that’s been terrible luck,” he says. “The guys have worked hard, but that’s speedway racing, the racing is really tight.”
Other drivers involved include Milka Duno, Mike Harmon, George Cushman, Terry Jones, Mark Thompson, Drew Charlson and Donnie Neuenburger. The race was put under red flag for a bit to clean up the mess.
The early incident in the race could’ve been caused by inexperience mixed in with veterans, along with fast and slow cars being mixed together due to qualifying being rained out. With qualifying being rained out, the series was forced to start by last year’s owners points.
“I think it’s just the way it is,” Gerhart says. “The series doesn’t have much they can do when things happen like this. With drivers not having the experience, there are some drivers up there that may not have as much experience. But I can’t finger point it on anybody in particular as I don’t know what happened.”
Some of the inexperienced have been working on side drafting, however Coulter says the wreck was more so caused by everybody fighting for the bottom of the track.
“I just got out of it,” he says. “That’s where that mess started.”
Justin Lofton has led the first 32 of 94 laps so far.
