Michael Waltrip was relieved to emerge unscathed after his #15 NAPA Chevy flipped twice in the backstretch grass at Daytona International Speedway yesterday. The two-time Daytona 500 winner wasn’t happy about the effort to extricate him from his upside-down car after his wild ride. “This isn’t the safest or the sanest thing to do, and you don’t look forward to being in those situations,” Waltrip said. “But you look forward to people helping you of it, and I didn’t appreciate what those safety workers were trying to do to get me out. I was trying to tell them just to turn the car over. All they had to do was flip it back over, and I could get out. They were cutting bars, and the whole car was on top of me. I don’t know what bar they thought they had to cut to alleviate the hole I was in. . . . And what did they eventually do? They flipped it over and I got out. I hope that was a lesson learned.” The crew needed about 10 minutes to remove the 6-5 Waltrip – the tallest driver in the Nextel Cup Series – from the cockpit of his battered car. His height makes getting in and out of the 18-inch window difficult, and he is one of only three drivers who have a roof hatch as an alternate exit. “I was pinned way bad in a box a 6-5 guy shouldn’t be in,” he said. NASCAR Senior Vice President of Communications Jim Hunter said the safety crew followed guidelines “to a T.” “Our procedure is not to turn a car over until the driver is OK,” Hunter said. “They were cutting the bars to help get him out of the car because they couldn’t use the roof hatch. I’d rather have Michael upset than Michael being injured.”(Richmond Times Dispatch)(2-16-2004)
