Kahne says TV cable yellow came too late during Charlotte race

The bizarre incident caused damage to 19 cars and also left 10 spectators with minor injuries.

NASCAR stopped the race to allow repairs to take place without any of the competitors involved being delayed.

Frontrunner Kyle Busch was one of those most seriously affected, and Kahne said his impact had been dramatic to watch as they raced together.

"I thought the cable was unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. I came around Turn 4, saw it wrapped around Kyle's car, and it hit mine," he said.

"I thought I was seeing things, there's no way there could be a cable on the racetrack.

"By the time we got to Turn 1, I saw Kyle's car got down, like it jerked it down. I knew I wasn't seeing things. I was yelling at him going down the backstretch.

"We came back around and people were still hitting it.

"I was surprised there wasn't a caution a little bit quicker when you have something like that hanging. It was very surprising."

NASCAR competition director John Darby described the incident as unprecedented, and said the officials had been determined to ensure it did not affect the race order.

"I've been in this business 30 years, and I'm the last person in the world you will ever hear say 'I've seen it all' because there is no such thing," Darby said.

"The first thing we did was we stopped the field and had the inspectors look at everybody's cars. We had 19 of them that we could confirm had damage.

"There could have been some others that we didn't know about, or had damage that was underneath.

"We needed to confirm everything that we needed to do to put the cars back like they were before the incident."

Broadcaster Fox Sports said the cable was from an overhead camera system that had been used successful at other events including NASCAR races, but would be shelved until the cause of the Charlotte failure was understood.