The NASCAR Ford Mustang Dark Horse has earned a reputation for toughness, and it lived up to that again during the September 29, 2025, Cup Series race at Kansas Speedway. In one of the weekend’s most dramatic moments, Zane Smith’s No. 38 Mustang ended up on its side after making contact with another car, sliding along the wall before finally coming to rest upright… with the driver unharmed.
According to NASCAR.com, the incident began when Smith was squeezed into the barrier during the middle stages of the race. The impact tipped his Mustang onto its driver’s side, where it scraped the wall for several hundred feet. Eventually, the car rolled back onto its wheels and slid to a stop. Despite the violent sequence, Smith was able to climb out under his own power and walk away.
Zane Smith exited the vehicle under his own power after this incident late at @kansasspeedway. pic.twitter.com/vbF4OXvROl
— NASCAR (@NASCAR) September 28, 2025
On NASCAR’s Hauler Talk podcast, Mike Forde, NASCAR’s managing director of communications, praised the car’s structure for keeping Smith safe. “We never like seeing that, so there is concern that it happened,” Forde said. “But from the structural integrity of the car, we’re not concerned. Nothing was bent, nothing was abnormal, and we were very happy with how all that went down.”
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He added that the team plans to study data from the crash to understand how the car ended up riding the wall, noting that cars often get pinched against the barrier but rarely flip in that manner.
This latest accident adds to a list of incidents demonstrating the resilience of the NASCAR Ford Mustang. The car’s design previously protected Ryan Preece in a pair of airborne wrecks at Daytona and helped Chris Buescher walk away from a 2023 rollover at Charlotte. For NASCAR’s newest Mustang generation, safety continues to be its strongest feature.
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