Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
Jamie McMurray, driver of the No. 1 McDonalds Chevrolet for Chip Ganassi Racing, finished the Geico 500 at Talladega Superspeedway in fourth place. It was a wild race towards the end so McMurray is just happy to finish in one piece.
“I was really fortunate,” McMurray said. “ was only caught-up in one of the wrecks. And I don’t know exactly what happened in the other two. Honestly, I don’t even know what happened in mine. I was so lucky that I got hit in the back and I spun to the bottom, but it didn’t tear-up the front-end. It didn’t tear the splitter up. And I don’t know that my car was faster afterwards, but it didn’t seem to hurt it any.”
McMurray felt the racing was different this year versus last year because of the current package they are running on the cars.
“As the Gibbs cars were all running around the bottom, it was a year ago that we were all riding around the top,” McMurray said. “But, the exact same rules package. The thing that’s a little bit tough about the current package is that when you get locked together, it’s hard to beat the guys that aren’t locked together. Like if you watch the Xfinity race yesterday, or when we had the taller spoilers, when you could get locked together, it was a big advantage. So I think guys get a little aggressive when you get towards the end with not necessarily locking together easy, it’s just like slamming, like maybe we used to do. And with the little amount of downforce that we have it’s so easy for the car to get out from underneath you.”
He felt with the downforce on the cars when another driver bump drafts with you the bump is a little harder than it was in previous years and races.
“Well, at the beginning of the race it’s not as big of a deal because you know that when you see the run coming, you know they’re going to lift a little bit,” McMurray said. “When we got down to the end there, I was just death-gripping the wheel and trying to hold it straight because every time you get hit, it gets turned a little bit, a different direction. And you have to be a little bit lucky there. It’s not all ability.”
McMurray thinks it is very concerning that cars were flipping during the race.
“Well, it’s very concerning,” McMurray said. “Yeah. Absolutely. The whole thing is, is that NASCAR works really hard on trying to prevent that. And I think one of the issues; I saw a little bit of a replay with Kevin’s (Harvick) is when you get spun and someone then drills you, I think it’s going to be really hard to ever make that not happen. But certainly, yeah, we need to keep looking at that and trying to make it better every race.”
Despite the concerns, though, he felt it can all be drew up to just typical racing at Talladega.
“I thought it was typical,” McMurray said. “I thought we had a few more wrecks than normal. I laugh because everyone is pretty calm until we get to halfway because we all want to get to halfway. And then it got a little bit wild after that. But it’s just plate racing. And honestly, when you look back at all of these restrictor plate races, you have a lot of wrecks that just don’t happen. And today we had a lot of wrecks, and they happened.”
