KANSAS CITY, Kan. – Unmitigated chaos led to a massive accident and a red flag period that involved all three Cunningham Motorsports entries during Friday night’s ARCA Racing Series season finale at Kansas Speedway.
On a restart right at the halfway point of the Kansas ARCA 150, newly-crowned series champion Chase Briscoe was racing for the lead with Dalton Sargeant, but got loose on the bottom lane in turn two and slid up the race track as he lost momentum and attempted to save his No. 77 Ford.
As Briscoe backed off, he made contact with teammate Austin Cindric halfway down the backstretch before ending up in the middle of a four-wide sandwich in turn three that saw Briscoe come down on his other teammate, Myatt Snider.
Contact between Briscoe and Snider sent the latter driver spinning, with Snider sliding sideways in turn three as multiple cars took evasive action to avoid the No. 22 Louisiana Hot Sauce entry.
Unfortunately, Kyle Weatherman’s Ford was unable to avoid Snider’s stopped race car.
After turning right to avoid plowing into Mike Basham’s slow car on the bottom of the track, Weatherman blasted the driver’s side of Snider’s machine and ended up airborne on the apron of the race track before the involved cars came to rest.
In total, more than a half dozen cars sustained some sort of involvement in the crash – including Briscoe, Cindric, Snider, Weatherman, Bret Holmes, Morgan Baird, Nick Higdon and Basham.
Snider was evaluated and released from the infield care center, giving his side of what happened on the FOX Sports 1 broadcast.
“On that restart, it looked like someone had messed up Chase and gotten him really loose because he had no momentum at all coming off the corner,” Snider explained. “I was coming up on the outside, and it looked like I had enough speed to be past him by the time I got to the corner. I went to go down underneath him, and then all of a sudden Kurzejewski had a huge run … went underneath me and took it four-wide.”
“At that point, I had no air on my car, and it caused it to spin out. I had it saved, pretty much, but I don’t know where Kyle Weatherman came from. It looked like Bret Holmes got into him, or something, and he ended up T-boning me. We had it pretty much cleared, but I hate it for me, Kyle and everyone involved. We all had good cars and were likely going to have good finishes, but that’s racing sometimes.”
Briscoe explained what he saw and felt over the radio during the red flag period.
“That’s part of racing on these big tracks,” the series champion said. “It’s definitely unfortunate that a lot of good cars got torn up there. I don’t feel like (it was a bad batch of tires) … if anything I spun the rear tires a little bit. I was sideways trying to save it and just hate that it took out a lot of good cars behind us.”
Weatherman climbed from his car, but was visibly limping as he was helped by safety officials to the ambulance. It was later announced that the 19-year-old Missouri native was transported by ground to a local hospital for further evaluation.
About the Writer
Jacob Seelman is the Managing Editor of Race Chaser Online and creator of the Motorsports Madness radio show, airing at 7 p.m. Eastern every Monday on the Performance Motorsports Network.
Seelman grew up in the sport, watching his grandparents co-own the RaDiUs Motorsports NASCAR Cup Series team in the 1990s.
The 22-year-old is currently studying Broadcast Journalism at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., and is also serving as the full-time tour announcer for the Must See Racing Sprint Car Series.
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