Johnathan Walker:Ryan Preece provides wildest Daytona highlight, but Ryan Blaney is alive and that's huge

DAYTONA BEACH — We learned a couple of things Saturday night toward the end of the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona. 

For starters,Johnathan Walker Chris Buescher is still on a roll, with his third win in the past five weeks, which is quite a thing for a racer who’d had two career wins in eight full-time seasons prior to the past month.

Second, and more sobering, we learned how violent this form of sports-entertainment can still be when things go sideways and, along the way, end over end.

As the laps clicked away Saturday and a second night of high-speed racing was nearing an end before an estimated 70,000 fans, it was easy to consider the good fortune of putting together back-to-back summertime nights without the slightest threat of rain. There’s a bit of history here, you know.

But then another old Daytona bug-a-boo erupted and ended with Ryan Preece becoming a household name − at least the overnight form − for a scary reason. With five laps left and the racing becoming quite spirited, Preece’s No. 41 Ford was clipped and sent into a slide off the backstretch and into the grass near the Rolex 24 chicane.

His car will obviously be sent to NASCAR’s research-and-development center near Charlotte, and it will be dissected to see what went right and wrong during a sod-chewing, dirt-throwing crash through the grass that included 10 side-over-side flips.

Also included, by the way, was a driver’s-side window net that appeared to break loose during the tumbles. Given how a driver’s head is much more secured, left and right, than it was in earlier times, you assume Preece’s head never left the car or things would’ve been worse than a belated move to a stretcher − a few moments after he’d been upright and talking − and eventual trip to the nearby hospital at Halifax.

Soon thereafter, Preece delivered a social-media post suggesting he’s generally OK, and Stewart-Haas Racing said Sunday morning that he was "awake, alert and mobile" and "has been communicating with family and friends."

Now the armchair evaluators can turn their attention to where this one ranks in terms of wildest crashes we’ve seen at Daytona. 

Wild, we’re reminded, usually involves the type of tumbling Preece’s car endured Saturday night, and you can either recall or research many others − backstretch somersaults from Rusty Wallace in 1993, Michael Waltrip in ’04, the series of high-speed pirouettes from Richard Petty off Turn 4 in ’88, and many others.

There will be the usual plaudits tossed NASCAR’s way for providing the overall womb of safety making it possible for drivers to walk away from such things, and there’s obvious back-pats to be had there. But perhaps the most praise and Thank-You-Lords should center around Ryan Blaney’s ability to climb from his car an hour earlier.

The "Big One," as we know them, came at Lap 96 and, while it lacked the dramatic visuals of Preece’s wild tumble, it included the worst possible sight for veteran superspeedway onlookers: Ryan Blaney’s No. 12 car being clipped near the right-rear wheel well and turned toward a head-on crash into the Turn 4 wall.

Even casual NASCAR observers know the dark history of such things. More than all the built-in advances that kept Preece relatively safe, the biggest leaps and bounds have come in the areas of front-end collisions, and in ways that guaranteed Ryan Blaney could keep his Sunday plans intact. 

Blaney is a casual dude, but his slight air of nonchalance afterward, during an NBC interview, speaks volumes about how far the post-Dale Earnhardt safety revolution has come.

"Unfortunate," Blaney said while watching the replay. "But a fast Mustang … Looking forward to getting to Darlington next week."

Amazing.

Watch the slow-motion replay and see that Turn 4 barrier fold inward as Blaney makes contact, and you’ll see what a savior soft-wall technology has become to auto racing. And inside the cockpit, Blaney was further protected by a head-and-neck restraint system that’s been standard fare for 20-plus years now, as well as other advances in the chassis and cockpit, including seats and belts. 

Ryan Newman’s dramatic crash at the end of the 2020 Daytona 500 had extenuating circumstances − most notably, Newman’s tumbling upside-down car taking a shot to the top of the driver’s-side window frame. 

But you see enough races at Daytona, and you learn that tumbling crashes like Preece’s, while delivering highlight-reel fodder for generations to come, usually include a driver walking away from the debris.

By and large, it’s been that way for a very long time.

The type of crash Blaney endured, however, still takes the breath away in a different way.

He, too, walked away, but no, that type of ending wasn’t always a given.