Ryan Newman was involved in a ghastly crash on the final lap of the Daytona 500 on Monday night, hospitalizing him with non-life-threatening injuries. NASCAR delivered the news nearly two hours after Newman was extricated from his car, saying he is in serious condition at nearby Halifax Medical Center. The wait for the update was excruciating for fellow NASCAR drivers and fans across auto racing who spent the time wondering how seriously he was hurt. Safety crews rushed to Newman’s No. 6 Ford and worked to get the 42-year-old driver out of his seat. The car was on fire as it skidded to a stop and had to be turned onto its tires first. Fox opted not to broadcast Newman’s removal, which was shielded by large black screens put up by track crews. Ryan Blaney, who locked bumpers with Newman and turned him sideways, sounded crestfallen. Corey LaJoie, who slammed into Newman’s sideways car at full speed, watched a replay and insisted he had no way to avoid the contact. Fox Sports analyst and four-time Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon may have summed it up best. View this post on Instagram NASCAR Driver Ryan Newman Expected To Survive Injuries After Horrific Crash at #Daytona500 A post shared by TheYeshivaWorld.com (@theyeshivaworld) on Feb 17, 2020 at 7:41pm PST “Safety’s come a long way in this sport, but sometimes we are reminded that it is a very dangerous sport,” Gordon said quietly as the broadcast came to a close with Newman’s condition still unknown. Breathtaking crashes are common at Daytona International Speedway, where drivers racing for position at 200 mph and in tight quarters often make contact. Austin Dillon memorably crashed into the catch fence on the final lap of the 2015 July race at Daytona and remarkably walked away unscathed. Dillon’s car went airborne and tore down part of the fence and injured several fans. Dillon’s torn car, with its engine already resting on another part of the track, ended up on its roof and then was smashed into by Brad Keselowski’s car. Newman’s wreck looked just as awful. Blaney turned him hard right and into the outside wall. His car immediately flipped and was sliding on its side when LaJoie rammed into it. “Dang I hope Newman is ok,” LaJoie tweeted. “That is worst case scenerio and I had nowhere to go but smoke.” Denny Hamlin won the race for Joe Gibbs Racing, his second straight victory in the season opener and third in the last five years. The team celebrated near the start-finish line and again when confetti flew in victory lane, prompting Gibbs to later apologize. “Some people may have saw us and said, ‘Those guys are celebrating when there’s a serious issue going on,’” Gibbs said. “I apologize to everybody. We really didn’t know. We got in the winner’s circle and then that’s when people told us. I wanted to explain that to everyone. “That’s what makes it so hard. Such a close-knit community, you know everybody. … If you think about all the wrecks that we’ve had over the last how many number of years, some of them have been real serious. We’ve been real fortunate.” It wasn’t the first crash like this for Newman at Daytona or at another superspeedway, the Talladega track in Alabama. […]

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