LAS VEGAS - NASCAR rolled west this week without Ryan Newman.
The 42-year-old Roush Fenway Racing driver's streak of 649 consecutive Cup Series starts dating to 2002 will end Sunday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway when he misses the second race of the 2020 season as he recovers from a spectacular last-lap crash in Monday's Daytona 500.
The rest of the regulars will be back on the track after the most frightening wreck in NASCAR in nearly two decades - one that made many of them think long and hard about what they do for a living.
That includes Team Penske's Ryan Blaney, who tried to push fellow Ford driver Newman to the win at Daytona International Speedway and instead hooked Newman's car into the spin that ultimately turned into an airborne, fiery spectacle with the No. 6 Mustang resting upside down and Newman trapped inside.
Blaney was clearly distraught after the race as he paced outside his car, even resting his head in his arms on the roof. He broke his silence as he headed to Las Vegas.
"Have been replaying the events in my head over and over about what I could've done differently ever since," Blaney wrote in a long post he shared via social media. "I'm very lucky to have a great family, friends, team and incredible fans that have helped me out this week. I can't wait to have Rocketman Ryan Newman back at the track racing as hard as ever."
AP photo by Terry Renna / Chris Buescher goes low on the track to avoid Ryan Newman's car as it flips on the final lap of Monday's Daytona 500.Ross Chastain will drive in place of Newman for Roush Fenway Racing, which has not revealed any details about Newman's potential injuries. The team has released some updates, including Wednesday's photo that showed the Indiana native walking out of the hospital holding hands with his two young daughters less than 48 hours after the devastating crash.
NASCAR's last fatal wreck in the Cup Series was on Feb. 18, 2001, when seven-time season champion Dale Earnhardt died after his car hit the wall on the last lap of the Daytona 500. The massive safety push that resulted has limited serious injuries since then.
Kyle Busch broke both legs in a crash at the 2015 Daytona 500, Denny Hamlin broke a vertebra in his lower back in a 2013 crash in California and Aric Almirola incurred a similar injury in a 2017 crash at Kansas Speedway. However, all of them got out of their cars, as did Austin Dillon, though he was pulled out of the window of his overturned Chevrolet after tearing out a chunk of fencing at Daytona during the July 2015 race at the Florida superspeedway. Kyle Larson got out of his car after it went airborne last April at Talladega Superspeedway.
And, with a lot of help, so did Newman, who for his entire 19-year Cup Series career has railed against the dangers of superspeedway racing. The winner of the 2008 Daytona 500 has flipped in races at the circuit's two 2.5-mile tracks several times, and he leaned on NASCAR to add a support bar to the cockpit now referred to as "The Newman bar."
"After I tore down the fence and walked out immediately with nothing, I definitely feel like these cars are the safest things out there," Dillon said Friday. "But it just goes to show you that you can be impacted in the wrong way and it can be compromised. We're going 200 miles per hour around each other, and sometimes force just overtakes what we know is safe."
The fears created Monday night came from the length of time it took Newman to be cut out of the car - nearly 20 minutes - and the two-hour wait for information after he was taken to a hospital. At that point, NASCAR said only that he had injuries that were not life-threatening.
The not knowing was difficult for a generation of drivers who have been fortunate to avoid the inherent danger of auto racing.
"When there's a guy that's getting extricated from a car, you always fear the worst, right?" Busch said, acknowledging the passive attitude that has been created in 19 years of safety improvements. "I think sometimes you take it for granted what we're doing, the severity of what we're doing, the course of action of what injury can happen. We're not invincible."
Dillon agreed.
"You get numb to it a little bit because people just jump out of the cars," Dillon said. "You just kind of say, 'It's (a crash is) safe enough, you're just going to be a little sore the next day.' Then you watch how long it took Ryan to get out, the amount of people it took to get him out and the safety workers doing their job, it definitely makes you think differently about it for sure. The 'it can happen.' You never think about that, but it's like, man, you can actually get hurt."
AP photo by David Graham / Rescue workers remove NASCAR Cup Series driver Ryan Newman from his car after he crashed on the last lap of the Daytona 500 on Monday at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Fla.They will race as scheduled Sunday - NASCAR rolled the week after Earnhardt's death, too - and each driver will have to process his emotions individually. Dillon recalled racing a week after his 2015 crash at Daytona.
"We put ourselves in that situation knowing what we're getting ourselves into," he said. "I know that when I went to Kentucky the next week, I just got in there and ran. I wasn't sore. I was ready. The only thing I had done during the week was talk more about it. It's part of what we do as race car drivers, and I think that's why people come watch us.
"We do put our lives on the line for this stuff. It's engaging for the fans to see. It's dangerous and that's a part of it - it's a part of the sport."
Busch missed 11 Cup Series races as he healed from his injuries in 2015, but he capped the season by winning his first championship on the top-tier circuit. He says he didn't have it so easy when he returned, though.
"It was tough for me. I was out for a while," he said. "And then getting back in the car you certainly have some of that in the back of your mind to start with and to get back in. 'Man, if I get back in and crash right away, is that going to end it all over again?'"
Busch even likened his situation to what anti-hero Rowdy Burns from "Days of Thunder" faced. The reigning Cup Series champion considers himself to be a living version of the character from the 1990 movie, and his nickname is "Rowdy."
"It's kind of the Rowdy Burns aspect. He was out with a head injury, and they said you can never race again, and if you ever race again, you'll probably die," Busch said. "You kind of think of those situations, but you try to put it out of the back of your mind as much as possible and just get out there and do your job. It took me five weeks to get back into the circle of things and be able to win again."
Newman's return to competition is an open question, and Roush Fenway Racing is not scheduled to give an update before Sunday. Several drivers have either spoken with Newman briefly or exchanged texts, though, and they said his well-known wit remained intact.
"I texted him and said, 'I knew it wasn't your neck that broke. I don't think you could do that,'" Team Penske's Joey Logano said. "We have a neck joke going back and forth because I've got a long one and he's got none. We had a good joke about that at least, so his sense of humor still seems to be there."