Vegas starts work on safety upgrades

Gordon called for improvements to be made on the inside wall where he crashed because there was not a SAFER barrier in place at the point of impact. Instead there is an angled access opening used by safety vehicles.

"We began evaluating that section of the speedway today," officials said in a statement. "As we have done since the SAFER barrier program began, we will work with NASCAR, and we will do whatever it recommends."

Gordon admitted at Phoenix, where he was testing on Monday, that his car hit the wall at the best possible angle to avoid injury, but the absence of a soft barrier made the impact harder than he had anticipated, causing him to move inside the seat of his car.

"I think we hit it at about the best angle we possibly could where it absorbed the energy and the energy kept moving," Gordon said. "When I was sliding sideways I didn't even think about that part of the wall. I was thinking that I was going to hit the flat part because I felt like I was far enough down the straightaway, that I wasn't going to hit that area.

"I couldn't really see because I was sliding and I could only see kind of what was ahead of me, so I was bracing myself for a fairly good impact, but not that kind of an impact and when it hit I was just blown away at how big the impact was and the way the car spun around and how much I moved in the seat."

Gordon believes the part of the wall where he hit could be reconfigured to make it safer, besides the implementation of a soft wall.

He also confirmed that Las Vegas track officials have already tried to contact him to acknowledge that work to make safety improvements had begun.

"It was an unfortunate situation," Gordon said. "But I hope something good can come out of it where we recognize that those areas need to have a soft wall for sure, and also that we need to try to find ways, you know, those openings are important for the safety crews but I think there's ways to make them less abrupt.

"Chris Powell, from Las Vegas Motor Speedway, left me a message about things that they're already looking at doing. All you can do at this point is look for the positives."