Richard Childress Racing and NASCAR continue to investigate the cause of a fiery explosion at the rear of Paul Menard’s Chevrolet during Sunday’s season finale at Homestead.
Menard’s mechanics were lucky to escape injury when the right-rear tyre exploded while the car was on pit road late in the race.
Menard had pitted with the right-rear of his car on fire following an earlier tyre failure that had left shredded rubber wrapped around the differential.
Although similar fires have been seen in the past, veteran team owner Richard Childress told media on Monday that he’d never seen anything like the explosion that followed.
“It blew the whole hub, the brake rotor, everything off of it,” he said.
“It didn’t just blow a tyre and that’s why we’ve got to find out, why it blew everything off the car.
“It was more of an explosion inside, I think. All of us are guessing now until we go back and look and see really what happened.
“Just when you think you’ve seen it all, you’ll see something new in this sport,” he added.
NASCAR’s vice president of competition, Robin Pemberton, described the incident as “pretty wild”.
“We’ve had situations in the past where we’ve had excessive heat buildup in tires and we’ve melted tires and inner-liners, but that was a pretty unusual set of circumstances and stuff that we can learn out of it,” he said.
“Thankfully, no one was hurt.”
See below for video of the incident
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