One of the big stories coming out of Sunday’s race at Michigan International Speedway didn’t have to do with race-winner Denny Hamlin; it had to do with a massive crash involving Hamlin’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Christopher Bell.
Hendrick Motorsports’ Chase Elliott lost control of his No. 9 Chevrolet, and it went careening up the track between Turns 3 and 4 into Bell.
That sent Bell’s No. 20 hard into the SAFER barrier.
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That was a massively consequential wreck for a few reasons. First and foremost, it left Bell, who was fortunately able to climb out of his car, with a broken wrist, though he has been cleared to race this weekend at Pocono.
Additionally, it dropped him three places in the standings down to 10th.
But it turns out that the impact wasn’t just big; a NASCAR executive says it was the biggest hit the Next Gen car — introduced in 2022 — has ever seen, and it’s also the hardest impact in a decade.
According to Motorsport, NASCAR communications executive Mike Forde was on the official “NASCAR Hauler Talk” podcast when he revealed that the hit was the hardest a Next Gen car had ever taken.
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He said that this was determined using a measurement known as Delta-v.
“Delta-v is the measure of speed lost in an incident,” he explained. “So if you’re going 200 mph and then all of a sudden you come to a stop because you hit a wall and scrub off X amount of speed, that difference is what the Delta-v is.”
Forde declined to give out a number, saying that this is essentially “proprietary data,” though it is shared with the team and with the driver.
NASCAR also measures the G-forces involved in these incidents, and that was also shared with the team. It is up to them whether they want to release those figures to the public.
