Cody Ware’s Watkins Glen Incident Raises Fresh Questions on Next-Gen Safety

“These cars have black boxes in them, and they need to trigger a yellow when a car has a 15G impact or 20—we all need to come up with that number,” Busch further added.

In Ware’s case, it was a hard crash where he slammed the barrier near pit road with nine laps to go. In response, NASCAR vice president of racing communications Mike Forde explained the reason why a caution was not given.

“Tim Bermann clicks over to Turn 6, and as he flips over, he sees the 51 rolling off, and the turn spotter radios the track is clear, so there’s no debris,” Forde said.

Nonetheless, after this incident, NASCAR is now developing a system to review the crash data to assist calling out cautions better.

Notably, Kurt Busch was involved in a wreck in 2022 while driving the 23XI Racing Next Gen car, and it was so critical, that it turned out to be a career-ending one.

When Kurt Busch opened up about a career-ending crash

In July 2022, Kurt Busch was racing at Pocono Raceway in the qualifying event of the race weekend. However, his outing came to a sudden halt as Busch suffered a crash in Turn 3.

“And so when I took that hit, when I backed in, the car then swung around and hit the right front. And I don’t remember the car hitting the right front. I was in outer space, like everything’s black and white,” Busch said about the crash.

The wreck was so impactful and dangerous that reports suggest that Busch hit the wall at 30G force, turned around, and hit the front at 18G. The accident sidelined him from racing, and finally after at the end of that year, he retired from NASCAR.