DOVER, Del. — Kyle Larson has survived near-death experiences on the track in all kinds of racing series.
Even with those harrowing standards in mind, the 2021 NASCAR Cup Series champion used the word "unsettling" to describe the aftermath of the full-contact hit from Ryan Preece's Stewart-Haas Racing No. 41 Ford in the April 23 race at Alabama's Talladega Superspeedway.
The crash twisted and busted the support bars in the roll cage of Larson's Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 Chevrolet. Two-time Cup Series champion Kyle Busch, who went on to post his second victory in his first season with Richard Childress Racing, compared the wreckage to a "brick getting rammed into a stick of butter."
Larson walked away. So did Preece. Both drivers are in good health and ready to race again at Dover Motor Speedway, though they'll be forced to wait a day longer than expected.
For the second year in a row, the one-mile concrete track's only race on the Cup Series schedule was postponed because of rain. Sunday's start time was moved up an hour after qualifying was rained out Saturday at Dover, but it didn't matter in the end — the race was postponed some two hours before the scheduled green flag and is now set for noon Monday on FS1.
It's the fifth time in 105 Cup Series races at the track — which formerly had two dates a year — that it will be held on a Monday, though this will be the third time since 2019.
Busch will start in pole position and Larson is listed as the 5-1 favorite to win by FanDuel Sportsbook, though the 30-year-old Californian might be grateful enough just to finish safely this week.
He was certainly thankful the wreck at Talladega wasn't worse. NASCAR's Next Gen car is only in its second season, and the sanctioning body is still making needed changes to improve safety in an inherently dangerous sport.
"You see things that could have easily gotten me in the car, whether it be the bars that had completely broke off and could have shanked me," Larson said Saturday. "Or what if I had a second impact? I'm not knocking NASCAR at all on that. They've worked really hard with this car to make it safer. I've been very thankful they took both my car and Preece's car afterward to dive in deeper into it and see how they can make it safer yet."
NASCAR's ongoing investigation includes recreating the crash through computer-aided designs and reviewing video from the in-car camera.
"It's pretty clear that changes have to be made," said Team Penske's Joey Logano, who last season won his second Cup Series championship. "I don't know how you fix it."
Busch and Logano were among several drivers who wondered whether the crash could have potentially been fatal had Larson been hit on the driver's side door. NASCAR said Saturday the driver's side construction is "multiple times stronger than the right."
"There's no other form of racing, in my opinion, that takes safety more seriously than them," Larson said of NASCAR. "But that doesn't mean the sport is safe."
A sequence of events led to the frightening moment at Talladega, where crashes have come to be expected on the 2.66-mile oval. First, Trackhouse Racing's Ross Chastain shoved his car into the middle for a third lane, where it bounced off another Chevy driven by Noah Gragson, who hit the wall to trigger the crash. Larson's car was knocked into the grass and shot back into the middle of traffic, where it was smacked by Preece, whose helmet visor was knocked open with the hit.
"It was probably one of the toughest hits I've ever taken in a race car," Preece said, "and I've hit walls with hung throttles on concrete, concrete walls with dirt behind them."
Everyone is hoping for a smoother ride Monday, when Hendrick's Chase Elliott will try to repeat as the race winner on the Monster Mile. Elliott has raced just four times this season, missing six events after breaking his left leg while snowboarding in early March, and the 2020 Cup Series champion likely needs a win somewhere along the way to make the 10-race playoffs.
This might be the place, though Elliott wasn't putting too much stock into anything that happened 12 months back.
"It's been a year since we've been here, and obviously a lot can happen in that amount of time," said Elliott, who will start 10th. "We'll get on track and kind of see where we stack up and go from there."
Elliott, who finished 12th at Talladega and 10th the week before that at Virginia's Martinsville Speedway in his return to racing, said he's just "pushing forward" as he drives the No. 9 Chevrolet with the lingering effects of his injury, which required surgery.
"I'm not going on runs or doing sprinting drills, but I feel fine," he said. "I don't feel like it impacts me in the car at this point. It's just one of those things where you're going to have good days, you're going to have days that you don't get around great. That's just going to be part of it here for a little while, I think."