Christopher Bell sustained the hardest crash impact of the Next Gen era when his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota pounded the Turn 4 wall on Sunday at Michigan International Speedway.
On the latest episode of the “Hauler Talk” podcast, Mike Forde, NASCAR vice president of racing communications, confirmed that the Delta-v, which measures the change in velocity, was the largest number recorded since the Next Gen made its debut in 2022.
According to Matt Harper, NASCAR managing director of safety systems, it’s also the hardest recorded hit in at least a decade.
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“Delta-v is the measure of speed lost in an incident,” Forde said. “So if you’re going 200 mph and then all of a sudden you come to a stop because you hit a wall and scrub off X amount of speed, that difference is what the Delta-v is. I can’t give out the Delta-v number for Bell. That data is proprietary in a way. We share that with the team and the driver, and that’s their data to do with what they want. But we can confirm that it was the largest number we’ve seen in the Next Gen era.”
— NASCAR.com —