“There’s no excuse for going backwards” on safety

Elliott’s Hendrick Motorsports teammate Alex Bowman was sidelined this week after suffering concussion-like symptoms following a crash at Texas Motor Speedway. He is the second Cup driver to be forced out of the car this year due to a concussion, with the other being Kurt Busch.

Both Bowman and Busch hit the wall rear-first in fairly tame accidents, but several drivers have stated that those impacts hurt far more this year. 

This weekend, the playoffs head to the high-speed Talladega Superspeedway where the wrecks are big and happen often. Despite this, not racing is not an option, according to Elliott.

‘We did this to ourselves’

“You come off a week like we had at Texas and somebody getting injured and you’re coming into here, where odds are we’re probably all going to hit something at some point tomorrow and probably not lightly,” said Elliott. “Do you just not show up? Do you just not run? I don’t think that’s feasible to ask.

“There’s always an inherent risk in what we do and it’s always been that way. My frustration, as I’ve referenced here in the past few minutes, is I just hate that we put ourselves in the box that we’re in right now. It’s just disappointing that we’ve put ourselves here and we had the choice. We did this to ourselves as an industry and that just should have never been the case. We should not have put ourselves in the box that we’re in right now. So my disappointment lies in that, that we had years in time and opportunity to make this thing right before we put it on track and we didn’t. And now, we’re having to fix it and I just hate that we did that. Like I said, I think we’re smarter than that and I think there’s just a lot of men and women that work in this garage that know better and we shouldn’t have been here.”

NASCAR has worked tirelessly to become a leader in safety, and a driver hasn’t lost their life in the top level of the sport since Dale Earnhardt Sr. in the 2001 Daytona 500. For all the criticisms of the Car of Tomorrow (which debuted in 2007), it was continuously praised for its safety advancements. Drivers walked away from horrific accidents completely unscathed. Then there’s Ryan Newman, who was injured but survived a massive crash in the Gen 6 car, where he took a direct hit to the roof his car.

Now, there seems to be a driver almost every week calling an incident the hardest of their career. Two drivers are sidelined, and Elliott believes “we should have…