True to the forecasts by Daniel Suarez and Denny Hamlin, the Daytona showdown was more of a demolition derby than a regular-season race. With Daytona serving as the final frontier for the 35 racers lurking outside the playoff’s golden ticket line, the stakes were sky-high.

But the spectacle that left everyone from die-hard NASCAR fans to the bigwigs reeling was Ryan Preece‘s car taking a nosedive. The collective breath of the racing community was held, hoping against hope for Preece’s safety. Thankfully, he emerged from the clouds the next day, battered but not broken.

Yet the riddle of what triggered the mishap hangs in the air. While many in the NASCAR trajectory, including Denny Hamlin, pointed fingers at the tricky grass patches, a chorus from the insiders’ camp blamed the breakneck speeds. Throwing his hat in the ring, another NASCAR insider has stepped forward, adding another theory to the ongoing saga.

NASCAR legend blames the Next-Gen cars for the major Ryan Preece Daytona accident

The race had barely warmed up when a staggering 16 cars bit the dust at the tail end of Stage 1, signaling that drivers were pulling out all the stops. The atmosphere turned from tense to grim when Ryan Preece’s car took a harrowing tumble during lap 156, with Eric Jones playing a part in the unfortunate chain reaction that saw Preece’s car pirouette in the air no less than ten times.

While the NASCAR grapevine is abuzz with theories ranging from treacherous grassy patches to speed demons, Kenny Wallace, a stalwart from the NASCAR Xfinity Series, believes the newfangled Next Gen cars are the culprits.

Drawing an analogy, Kenny exclaimed, “I call these new Next Gen cars, I have a nickname: the bottom are what we call turtle shells; if you pick a turtle up, it’s completely smooth on the bottom.

And aerodynamically, this is kind of like the Indycars. So the new next-gen car, as soon as it picked up a little bit, it grabbed air and it went. That’s a lot of lift underneath those big 3500-pound race cars; it gets to going.”

While Wallace didn’t entirely jump on the NASCAR insider, Brett Griffin’s ‘grass culprit’ bandwagon, he conceded there might be a grain of truth to the idea that once the car’s nose digs into the grass, it exacerbates the flipping.

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The former Fox reporter further clarified, “I’ll meet you halfway, and as you break it down, I watched it frame by frame; grass doesn’t help. It doesn’t help, especially with the pointy edges on the noses.”

NASCAR insider suggests removing grass to prevent major accidents

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Reflecting on the dramatic Ryan Preece airborne incident on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast, Denny Hamlin observed, “It was going airborne way before the grass. The grass made it bite, and that’s when it caused it to twirl in the air.”

On a similar front, when discussing the spine-tingling mishap with his DBC crew, Freddie Kraft and TJ Majors, where the conversation veered off towards the high speeds as a possible cause, another NASCAR insider, Brett Griffin, joined the chorus of people blaming the grass.

Brett mused, “I will say this about the grass, though: I am all for it if you are making a mistake having a penalty, right? But at a superspeedway, if grass is a problem too, it’s not that hard to do away with it.”

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With the dust still settling from the Ryan Preece calamity, the onus is on NASCAR to gear up and address these concerns. The jury’s still out on the culprit, be it the next-gen car or the innocuous-looking grass. While high-speed races are the lifeblood of NASCAR, if they come with the steep price tag of risking a driver’s life, perhaps the bell has tolled for a change.