It was tough luck for three Toyota NASCAR contenders that ended up in the gutters of the race tracks. When bad luck strikes, and then comes disaster.
It is known that a lot of race cars have been declared by action on the pressurized cemented high borders of Bristol Motor Speedway. This was the situation were all three Toyota Camry units contending in the Sharpie Mini 300 event were wedged up in accidents. And it does look like that in this situation, more than one accident occurred. But I guess that’s what racing is all about!
Dave Blaney, in the Camping World/RVs Camry, marked the top Toyota finish which landed them on the 30th place. And this happened even though he was not able to run anymore when Carl Edwards over ran him and took charge, got the checkered flag and won the said event.
Blaney has reached the top 20 before the smashing accident happened that caused him to slow down and eventually hammered him out of the race.
"We just got wrecked there toward the end of the race. We have struggled with the Busch car all weekend in practice and then again in qualifying. But we thought we could at least get a decent finish today by staying out of the wrecks, but that just wasn’t the case today. It’s pretty frustrating because I know we’re going to take a hit in the points with this one, but we’ll have to try and get that back when we get to Nashville," he said.
David Reutimann driving in the Aaron’s Dream Machine was in fact running at the finish line, although he was far behind the finish line after making general repairs and soon he ended up in 33rd place. He was driving in the top 20 standings, but failed to maintain his position after the bumpy and exterior car parts crashing accident occurred.
"I hadn’t gotten into anybody all day; I hadn’t put a scratch on the car. Then the No. 77 car just tagged me from behind. I don’t know what happened or why. It’s just pretty disappointing. But that’s kind of been the way our season has gone so far. We’ll just have to regroup and keep digging. We were running okay before the wreck, but we still weren’t anywhere near as good as we were yesterday. We had made some gains on it, but we were still pretty far off. I think we would have been able to get a pretty decent finish today, but we’re not going to have that chance now," said a true blue frustrated Reutimann.
Lastly, we have Jason Leffler, who was drawn in in three different causes in the early part of the race. He came back to finish a few more laps before parking it for good and completed the race that brought him into 34th place.
"We had quite a day today. Unfortunately, we just can’t seem to get any kind of luck on our side this year. It’s frustrating for everyone on the Great Clips team. We have such a great group of guys and awesome equipment with amazing support from Toyota. We should be contending for wins every week and not fixing wrecked race cars like we have been. We’ll just keep digging and moving forward and hope for a better week at Nashville," Leffler said.