In his days in NASCAR, Dale Earnhardt Jr. has seen a lot happen on the race track. Marco Andretti showed him something new at COTA, though. Andretti was racing, with no one around him, when his entire rear housing fell out of his truck.
The incident was wild. Not only did it happen right before Corey Heim took the white flag in regulation, sending the race into overtime, it was overall a bizarre situation. His rear housing went rolling one way and his truck slammed to the ground.
NASCAR has since taken the rear-end housing to investigate the cause. Dale Earnhardt Jr. has spoken with NASCAR and gave a rundown of the incident on the Dale Jr. Download.
“When I see this, two things come to mind. There’s some trickery, so they’re doing something to the trailing arms or something back there to try to improve forward drive,” Earnhardt explained. “Or, he wheel-hopped the crap out of this truck. So, I called into NASCAR yesterday and talked to a few people and there seems to be, at this point yesterday, there was no trickery. Like looking at it, it’s all straight everything’s bolted in there right, everything is tight. Apparently, there was a failure of the trackbar mount first like a heim on the trackbar or something broke first. There was people that saw the rear end moving back and forth before it came out of the truck.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. went through times when he had similar incidents. Wheel hopping can tear up a race car or truck. While Earnhardt has tore up some rear ends before, he’s never done what Andretti did.
“This thing went through forces that we’ve never seen. We never see trailing arms, dual trailing arms break in half and the whole rear end, that rear end housing, whatever went on there it went through some forces that our cars never see,” the host continued. “Unless they’re flipping down the damn front straightaway at Daytona or something like that. It’s just driving around on four tires, we’ve never seen it rip the rear end out, straight out of a car or a truck.”
NASCAR is going to get to the bottom of this. Overall, they want to find a way to prevent it from happening in the future. While Andretti was going relatively slow at the time, that issue could cause a major wreck. If that happens in the pack going into Turn 1 at COTA, then you get a lot of destroyed trucks.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. believes wheel hopping is to blame. Perhaps even damage in practice helped cause the issue.
“When I see that happen in that truck race that’s the only thing I can think of, is Marco is downshifting and using the engine braking, probably downshifting too early and wheel-hopping a lot. And maybe did some things in practice also that created some damage that sort of continued to worsen as he went on into the race, I don’t know.”
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