Carson Kvapil’s night at Kansas ended less than a minute after it began when his car flipped on the backstretch on the second lap of Saturday night’s NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series race. The 22-year-old was on the pole position when the wreck unfolded and was checked and released from the infield care center afterward.
Kvapil said, “Not too fun, I actually didn’t think it was going to flip over like that,” after the crash. His car was in the middle of William Byron on the inside and Justin Allgaier on the outside when the contact happened, and the hit turned Kvapil head-on into the outside wall before Parker Retzlaff struck the car as it was hitting the wall, launching it into a tumble.
Safety workers flipped the car back onto its wheels, and Kvapil was able to get out on his own. He is the son of former NASCAR Truck Series champion Travis Kvapil and is in his second full-time season in NASCAR’s No. 2 series, where he finished fourth in the standings a season ago and was one of four drivers racing for the championship in the final year of NASCAR’s winner-take-all playoff format.
Kansas has now seen cars leave all four wheels in recent years. Last year, Zane Smith’s car rode the wall on its side at the track, and Erik Jones’s car flipped over on the backstretch in the 2017 Cup Series race there. Kvapil’s wreck was over almost as quickly as it started, but it fit a pattern the Kansas track has shown before: when the field gets bunched up and the outside wall gets involved, the consequences can be severe in a hurry.
