Anything that could go wrong did go wrong with the Daytona 500. Postponed to the next day because of rain, and then postponed again to the evening due to more storms, the great American race also had a nearly two hour delay due to a collision that caused a massive fireball.
Juan Pablo Montoya’s car hit a large jet dryer vehicle and the explosion brought the race to a stop. Montoya and the driver of the truck were OK. And repairing/cleaning the track from the fire took a mighty long time.
NASCAR officials had the rest of the drivers stop their cars, and Brad Keselowski took advantage of the break to post photos and answer questions from fans on his Twitter account, @keselowski.
Obviously, he had his mobile phone with him in his race car.
“Nothing we could do there.”
“Never saw the wreck till we were windshield deep.”
These were some of his tweets.
Keselowski tripled his number of followers on the night, going from approximately 65,000 before the race to nearly 200,000 as the race got ready to resume.
“Time to get back racing, thank you for following!,” Keselowski signed off.
This led to a very prolonged discussion about Twitter during delay portion of the Fox telecast. There was talk about how to build your brand online, who has the biggest following…you get the idea. Dave Blaney, the leader of the race at the time, does not have a Twitter account; this fact was reiterated numerous times.
The race was eventually restarted, and won by Matt Kenseth. Keselowski finished 33rd, Danica Patrick 38th.
Here’s video of the crash
Paul M. Banks is CEO of The Sports Bank.net, an official Google News site generating millions of unique visitors. He’s also a regular contributor to Chicago Now, Walter Football.com, Yardbarker, and Fox Sports
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