NASCAR: Drivers blame downforce package for Kentucky 'big one'

In a scene reminiscent of Daytona or Talladega, a multi-car crash erupted on lap 92 of the Quaker State 400 at Kentucky Speedway, collecting eight mid-pack cars to varying degrees.

The incident began when Kyle Larson got into the back of a loose Brian Scott, sending his No. 44 Ford and collecting Chris Buescher and AJ Allmendinger. Danica Partrick, Regan Smith and Cole Whitt had nowhere to go but into the pile but each were able to brake hard enough to avoid significant damage.

Scott said the turbulence in traffic played a role in starting the crash.

"I was expecting it to get loose and when it happened I thought I had it saved," Scott said. "I was just trying to gather it back up and lose the spots we were gonna lose, but go on and then some cars barreled in pretty fast from behind and caused a pile up. It started with me. It's a product of new paves. You just don't have any room and everybody holds each other really tight and it's just difficult.

"This low-downforce package is racing really well, but it doesn't really matter what downforce package you have when you've got two cars really tight on you from behind and on the side you just have no air on your car and there was nothing I could do."

In a similar tone, Buescher cited the extra-reduced downforce package for the crash.

"Everybody keeps begging for less and less downforce, and we keep seeing more and more incidents because of it," Buescher said. "I think it has made better racing at a lot of race tracks, but it's not easy to get into Turn 3 here side by side."

A very frustrated Allmendinger said he put himself that far back in the field and simply paid the price for it.

"I won't say we deserved it, but we put ourselves back there," Allmendinger said. "We weren't very good all night. Randall Burnett (crew chief) and everybody we were trying to figure it out. We just missed it all weekend. I thought we had a really good test here. They changed the tire and it's our own fault we didn't figure the tire out as good as other guys did."

This is the second race of a two-race reduced downforce package experiment that started at Michigan last month and continued this weekend.

The changes for these races consisted of a reduction in spoiler height from 3.5 inches to 2.5 inches, a splitter reduction of two inches and a re-sizing of the rear deck fin to complement the spoiler change.