Few would have expected to see carnage unfold the way it did at Gateway on Saturday. During the Nu Way 225, a massive multi-car collision in the pit lane caused chaos, leaving multiple drivers baffled, while JR Motorsports’ Rajah Caruth denied any blame despite effectively becoming the cork in the bottle in that situation.
Caruth didn’t directly cause the crash. When William Sawalich checked up in the pit lane at the end of Stage 1, the field bunched up behind him. Caruth’s No. 88 slowed, but Nick Sanchez couldn’t, hitting the back of Caruth’s Chevy and sending him spinning sideways next to Brent Crews’ stall.
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Caruth’s left-rear then clipped the right-rear tire of Crews’ stationary car, while his spinning Chevy even ripped a tire from JGR crew member Brad Donaghy’s hands and struck him in the back. With Caruth stuck sideways across the lane, more than half the field had nowhere to go, setting off the 10-car pileup, which brought out the red flag.
“Well, I think the 19 [Crews] missed this box, and it caused us all to stack, and I got sold down. But I’m guessing everyone behind me didn’t get stopped because I was off the ground. So I just think a story, you know what?” Caruth said in an interview shared by veteran journalist Matt Weaver on X.
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Caruth felt that without the incident, he could have made it to the top three by the end of the race, in which he recovered to finish 11th. As for the incident itself, he was not surprised because the pit lane at the World Wide Technology Raceway is considered to be the narrowest among all NASCAR venues. Why did it happen? He doesn’t know.
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“I was pretty frustrated. It would be one thing if I did something wrong, but I mean, that was pretty out of my control. So I was frustrated, to say the least,” Caruth added in the same interview.
He wasn’t the only driver in the wreck to insist that they had little idea about what happened either. Harrison Burton, who was also in the wreck, said that he was right on the bumper of Jeremy Clements, who ran into the driver ahead. Sanchez, who hit Caruth, also said something along the same lines.
“You know, I was tight up against the 88, and he abruptly stopped. I tried my best to stop. I think I may have been able to contact him, and then next thing you know, I was up in the air. Whoever was behind me, behind him, behind that person, we all just fell in there… I still don’t know what happened. I didn’t cause it,” Sanchez said.
It was Sawalich’s initial incident that seemingly triggered the whole reaction. It ended up collecting 10 drivers — Caruth, Sanchez, Clements, Jones, Burton, Jeb Burton, Anthony Alfredo, Ryan Sieg, Dean Thompson, and Patrick Staropoli. Brent Crews, meanwhile, was already in his stall and was nothing but a sitting duck.
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In hindsight, Sawalich escaped the incident relatively unscathed. But later in the same race, he intentionally door-slammed and wrecked Hendrick Motorsports’ prodigy Corey Day, further escalating their heated rivalry.
Caruth, meanwhile, damaged his body heavily. But the red flag stoppage allowed his team to patch the No. 88 up properly, and he went on to recover and keep his Chase hopes alive. Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s driver is currently 12th in the standings. Sanchez and Burton, sadly, were not as lucky.
Both their cars suffered too much damage for them to continue. Sanchez was classified 34th, with Burton behind him in 35th. The good news is that, despite this rather bizarre Big One, no one in the pit lane was injured, not even Donaghy.
In the end, it was a bizarre pit-road incident that none of the drivers seemed to see coming. Caruth escaped with a solid finish and kept his Chase hopes alive, but for Sanchez and Burton, the 10-car pileup brought their nights to an early and frustrating end.
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For something that unfolded in just a few seconds, the pit-road pileup left plenty of questions behind. Even the drivers caught in it were still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong.
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