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February 28, 2007
More on David Reutimann's Wreck
David Reutimann felt well enough to head to Car of Tomorrow testing today, but it was mostly to act as a spectator. He's apparently still feeling sore so Mark Green, who works for Michael Waltrip Racing as Michael's spotter, filled in for David as the test driver for the #00. David, who hopes to take a few laps in the car at some point before the end of the test session said,
"I'm getting better. It's a slower process, as far as feeling better, than you'd like, but it's coming along pretty good, so I'll hopefully be OK here at some point during the day."
I'm sure he probably hates to see another driver behind the wheel of his car, but it's a good idea to play things safe and let his body heal more from the wreck. This way when he heads to Mexico tomorrow, he's as close to 100% as possible.
As he's being doing for the past few days, David continued to say that he got the wind knocked out of him, rather than he was knocked out like some have speculated happened. He said,
"It just knocked the breath out of me really bad. It took me a minute to try to get my breath back and kind of figure out what I was doing. That's why I didn't say anything on radio. I didn't say anything on radio because I couldn't get enough air in there to make some noise."
If I were in a wreck like that, I'd be too scared and in shock to say too much!
Over the past few year or so, I've started to like Greg Biffle a lot more than I ever did. A big reason for that is that I have a friend who is a big fan of Greg's, and she's told me lots of great things about him. But Greg is also an awesome driver, and he's friendly with Michael, so that tells me he must be a good guy too. But what I really like is that Greg immediately took full responsibility for causing the wreck, something that many drivers might not do. He said,
"It was my fault 100 percent there at the end of the race."
Greg than explained that he was trying to pass David for position.
"It was not intentional by any means. I was trying any way possible to get underneath David there to try and get that position. He was two laps down, and I was trying to race Joe Nemechek and Ryan Newman in front of him for position. We were about 12 laps to go."
Of course it wasn't intentional - no driver wants to put another driver into the wall that hard, and no driver wants to screw up a chance for a good finish for themselves that close to the end of the race by doing something that could result in wrecking themselves too right along with the other car. But every driver on the track wants to finish as well as possible, and they will be aggressive and race hard in an attempt to gain positions at the end of the race. This is racing, not knitting, and there's going to be some bad things that happen as a result of hard racing sometimes.
He also said that he found David in the motorcoach lot after the race to talk about the incident.
"I saw him in the motorhome lot after the race. I just told him that certainly I didn't mean to get in the back of him. It was a racing deal. And he knew that I didn't mean to do it, and [that] it was a racing deal."
David who was the one who was involved in the wreck understood that Greg didn't mean to do it, and that it was just one of those racing deals. So why do fans who weren't even there have such a hard time understanding that?
Posted by silverdsl at February 28, 2007 04:25 PM