Marco Andretti losing his rear-end housing was one of the biggest points from the NASCAR Truck Series race at the Circuit of the Americas which has kept people engaged even today. However, when NASCAR’s Senior Vice President of Competition spoke about it, there was a sense of shooting in the dark. Elton Sawyer spoke about the Andretti matter in a recent interview on SiriusXM Radio, but he acknowledged that he had no clue about what exactly happened to damage the #4 truck in such a way.

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In today’s day and age, safety is a big issue not just in NASCAR, but all of motorsports. So for a senior executive of the competition to go out in public and say that he was not sure about what caused a rear end housing to come off must be alarming to some drivers. Marco Andretti was thankfully safe, but things could have easily gone sideways, especially if this was an oval race. However, Sawyer assured that they would be taking all the necessary steps to make sure that it does not happen again.

Talking about how most of the parts looked intact, Sawyer said, “In all honesty, that’s the first time I have seen that. We don’t want to see that again. Not 100% exactly what happened. We have the rear end housing that we brought back here to the R&D center. What we can tell you is the U-bolts that basically hold the trailing arms to the bottom of the rear end housing and the saddle were intact. The lug nuts were tight.”

The executive then shared what might have gone wrong, reiterating at the same time that he doesn’t want to speculate. “Just in front of the saddle on the rear end housing it looked like somebody cut it. What we’ll do, we’ll go back…they looked like quality parts, I don’t know, I don’t want to speculate. I don’t know what type of issues they were having as far as maybe wheel-hop, things like that and the rear suspension will obviously be detrimental to other components,” he said.

Now, there are a lot of factors that could have led to this situation arising at COTA. It’s not always the fault of the mechanics or the car. Sometimes, the track plays a big role in how a driver’s race turns out and that could have been the case here as well.

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The NASCAR trucks are not exactly very tall. The floor is not too far away from the ground. Normally, this doesn’t cause an issue on superspeedways, but at COTA, there are kerbs at almost every corner of the track. If a driver makes a mistake while riding the kerbs, it can severely damage the floor and other components in the car. Sawyer also believes that these kerbs, among other things, might have been a factor.

“We as a sanctioning body, we need to figure out why it happened. It is the first time I can remember having those types of parts come off. 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. We can go back work with out folks…look at the data. Shifting, obviously you got kerbs there, a lot of challenging areas on the track. Pit stops, leaving the box, those kind of things we will all look at to get a feel of exactly what happened,” he added.

It will be interesting to see what NASCAR comes up with once all the investigation is done. What do you think caused the damage to Marco Andretti’s truck? Let us know your opinions.

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