Josh Berry encountered the wildest of crashes at the Talladega Superspeedway on Sunday. Just as the Wood Brothers Racing driver was racing amongst the leaders on lap 18 at a speed of over 190 miles per hour, a bird crashed into his windshield and spread its guts all over. Fortunately, the impact did not take him by surprise, and he was able to wait till he got to the pit road to get the mess cleaned up.
Advertisement
His crew chief, Miles Stanley, spoke to Frontstretch and shared further details about the loss of the avian. He said that Berry had not notified them about the accident immediately.
Stanley said, “A lot of times when we come here for like first practice or qualifying and stuff, we’ll see birds flying out around the racetrack. So, it’s not a huge surprise that we ended up getting one on the windshield.”
Josh Berry just hit a bird going like 184mph at Talladega.
— Colin Dunlap (@colin_dunlap) April 27, 2025
The crew had been able to figure out that something had hit the car by watching the in-car camera and from the windshield. “We had seen that there was some damage from the bird strike,” he said. “I mean, nothing we could really do about it. It was damaged by it. Just from hitting it. Nothing too big performance-wise. It probably tore some tear-offs and stuff like that.”
He wasn’t able to say for certain that the aerodynamics of the car had not been affected. However, Berry’s performance in the race until the last pit stop proved that it had not. He raced at the top all day and looked set for a great finish. A speeding penalty in the final pit stop derailed all the good work and pushed him down to a rather underwhelming 26th-place finish.
A brief breakdown of Berry’s race at Talladega
Josh Berry started the race from eighth place and raced into the top three quickly. He took the lead on lap 4 and led five more times for a total of 12 laps. He avoided getting involved in a crash as Ryan Blaney and Brad Keselowski wrecked behind him as they were heading to the pit road on Lap 44.
Luck favored him when his fuel tank kept powering his car till officials cleared the pit road and allowed him to make his stop. The No. 21 crew took time to repair the car and clean the bird remains that were stuck to its front. The delay ended up with him finishing Stage 1 in 29th place.
He started Stage 2 from 13th place and raced back to join the leaders. He finished the stage in 10th place and gathered a single stage point. Every driver began making their final pit stops as the laps counted down in the final stage. Berry took the lead on Lap 168 and held it for a while before going to the pit road for refueling his Mustang.
Unfortunately, this was when he got hit with a speeding penalty. With only 16 laps left in the race, he was unable to cover ground and he ended up 26th. His next race will be at the Texas Motor Speedway.
