In 2015, Kyle Busch suffered arguably the worst wreck of his career at Daytona that left him with a broken foot and a broken leg, which eventually resulted in him missing 11 Sprint Cup races at the start of that season. When he made his comeback in July of that year, one of the first demands Busch made was that grass be removed from tracks.
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Fast forward to 2023, and Kyle Busch is still standing by his demand. He wants all the grass from the racetracks to be removed, considering what happened to Ryan Preece last week at Daytona. And along with Busch, there’s also Kevin Harvick, who also raised his concerns about the grass and demanded it be gone.
Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick don’t want any grass on racetracks
Ahead of the first playoff race at Darlington this weekend, Kyle Busch was asked by the media about his take on the Preece wreck from last week. He said, “Obviously going that fast, car getting turned around backwards, touching grass, and lifting, it’s a sheet of plywood so it lifts way too easy. That was concerning obviously and then just how fast it took off.”
“It looked like an iRacing crash. It was crazy … know 3500 pounds could move that fast.”
When asked whether he still stands by his opinion about grass at racetracks, Busch empathically replied, “A 1000%, all day long. I don’t know why we have grass.”
Similarly, Kevin Harvick claimed that he doesn’t like the grass and that if not for the grass, the wreck could’ve been different in his opinion. “I still think that wreck was more violent than it probably would’ve been if it was not going from one surface to the next,” Harvick said.
“The grass really needs to go. It sure seems like going from grass to asphalt is what got the car going to grass what got the car going.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. thought there was a bigger culprit than the grass in 2015
Just as Harvick echoed Busch’s statement in 2023 on the grass subject, Busch believed back in 2015 that other drivers would echo his stance as well. But Dale Earnhardt Jr. didn’t necessarily think the problem lay with the grass.
“It’s been mentioned by several drivers,” Earnhardt Jr. said as per USA Today. “I don’t know about getting rid of the grass. I think we should get rid of the splitter on the car that digs into the grass. If you get rid of the splitter, you save yourself a lot of trouble.”
However, Busch was pretty adamant in his belief then, that the reason behind a racecar getting tossed up in the air and doing violent flips was because “it continually keeps getting chunked up in the grass,” something which may have been present in the recent Preece incident as well.
But was the grass the real culprit in Preece’s horror wreck at Daytona last week? And if so, will NASCAR and the racetracks take the steps to fix this problem?
