Earnhardt Jr. crashes in practice, forced to backup

By Mark Aumann

TALLADEGA, Ala. -- Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s day at Talladega Superspeedway started out poorly when the engine on his No. 88 Chevrolet went sour just eight laps into Friday's first practice session.

But things went from bad to worse in an instant when the right rear tire exploded while he was leading a pack of cars during final practice for Sunday's Amp Energy 500, setting off a chain-reaction accident that damaged at least six cars Earnhardt had no warning when the tire exploded and sent him out of control. "I think the tire seemed to come apart at the tread and the sidewall," Earnhardt Jr. said. "We looked to the car, and really nothing has fell off of it. Normally you look at exhaust straps and stuff like that, but it just come out of nowhere.

"It is hard to say. I will look at some of the replays to see if anything came out from under it. Maybe we can find it on the replay, something we might have run over."

David Gilliland's No. 38 Ford was directly behind Junior and had a close-up view of the incident as the single-file pack exited Turn 2 nine minutes into the final practice session. Earnhardt was leading Gilliland, Tony Stewart and Kasey Kahne when chaos reigned.

"Junior blew a right-rear tire," Gilliland said. "In the middle of the corner, the thing just came apart. It's just an unfortunate incident.

"There was nothing he could do and there was nothing I could do. It was just kind of being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

While Earnhardt and Gilliland collided and blocked the top groove, several other cars took evasive action. Stewart was sent on a wild ride through the infield grass. Kahne nearly had the incident missed, but his right front fender clipped one of the spinning cars, and the resulting flat tire did serious damage to the quarterpanel.

Kahne said it happened so fast, he didn't have much time to react.

"I was right in the middle of a pack of cars when all of a sudden, I just saw tire rubber everywhere," Kahne said. "I tried to get by without hitting anything, but just got clipped in the right front."

Goodyear officials were inspecting what remained of Junior's tire to determine if it had been cut by something externally rather than suffering internal failure. The explosion and resulting accident was severe enough to tear nearly all of the sheetmetal off of the No. 88, from the rear window to the back bumper.

"From what we can determine, it has all the signs of a puncture," said Goodyear spokesman Rick Heinrich.

Earnhardt and Gilliland were checked and released from Talladega's infield medical facility. While that was going on, their crews were busy unloading backup cars from their haulers. In addition, the damage on Kahne's Dodge, Clint Bowyer's Chevy and David Reutimann's Toyota was significant enough for them to decide to pull out the backups.

The track reopened for practice nearly 30 minutes after the incident.