NASCAR’s Elton Sawyer reveals NASCAR is looking into why Marco Andretti’s truck lost rear axle

“In all honesty, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen that. We don’t want to see it again. I’m not 100% sure exactly what happened,” Sawyer said. “We have the in-house that we brought back here to the R&D Center. What I can tell you is the U bolts, I know you and Mike are real familiar with kind of how that rear suspension works in the trucks. The U bolts, they basically hold the trail and arms to the bottom of the rear and in the saddle, were intact. The lug nuts were tight. Just in front of the saddle on the rear end housing, it basically sheared off. It looks like somebody just cut it with a with a Sawzall. So what we’ll do, we’ll go back. We’ll — looked like quality parts. I don’t know, you know, I don’t want to speculate. I don’t know what type of issues they were having, as far as you know, maybe wheel hop. You know, there’s things like that in the rear suspension that will obviously be detrimental to the components.

“We, as a sanctioning body, we need to figure out A, why it happened. It is the first time I can remember, and having those type of parts come off. You know that, there’s a huge safety issue there. Thank God nobody was hurt. Marco was fine. But we need to take a deeper dive into that and see exactly what happened. You know, we can go back and work with our folks Ilmor. Looking at the data, you know, shifting. Obviously, you’ve got curbs there. A lot of challenging areas on the track. Pit stops, leaving the box, those type of things that we’ll all look at to kind of get a feel for what exactly happened.”

As you can tell, Elton Sawyer and NASCAR as a whole are taking the incident extremely serious. It’ll be interesting to find out what caused Marco Andretti’s rear axle to dislocate from his truck, but the series will be better for knowing when they figure it out.