Seeing a 3,300-pound race car lift off the ground as light as a feather will always be an eerie and terrifying sight. Just imagine how terrifying it is for the driver strapped into the gravity-defying projectile, waiting for the inevitable thud upon landing. That was the reality for 23-year-old NASCAR Xfinity Series racer Kyle Sieg on the final lap of Saturday’s Cabo Wabo 250 at Michigan International Speedway.

Sieg, driving the No. 28 Bailey Excavating Ford Mustang for the family-owned RSS Racing team, said as he felt his car drifting into zero gravity, he closed his eyes and hoped for the best before taking off and beginning the most exciting ride of his young racing career.

“I closed my eyes when I was about to flip on my head. Just hard. It’s a scary ride,” Sieg, a Tucker, GA native, recalled after being examined and released from the Infield Care Center. “I’m glad I’m OK. The air went out of my lungs there. I’m just glad I’m OK.”

Sieg explained that in addition to being knocked out of breath, he also suffered a minor injury to his right arm, but the driver hopes it is nothing serious. The fact that Sieg survived the wild crash with almost no injuries is not a miracle, but a testament to the modern advances in safety in the sport of NASCAR.

On the final lap of an overtime attempt, trouble arose before victory and a thundering pack of ruthless drivers with their feet glued to the ground. The replay shows that Parker Kligerman, driver of the No. 48 Big Machine Racing Chevrolet Camaro, bump drafted Caesar Bacarella in the No. 45 Alpha Prime Racing Chevrolet Camaro, causing Bacarella’s car to spin.

That impact sent Bacarella to the inside and into the No. 88 JR Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro driven by 21-year-old Carson Kvapil. As Kvapil began to spin to the inside, the field piled up behind him as drivers tried to slow down to avoid the crash developing in front of them. That’s when Sieg felt a push from a competitor from behind that literally sent him flying.

“I was, like I said, on the home stretch, I was behind (Kligerman) and I don’t know. We were all pushing and (Bacarella) got out of control. (Leland Honeyman) just – I don’t know, I hit (Kligerman) and then (Honeyman) just didn’t seem to take off,” Sieg explained.

As Sieg drifted left, he collided with the No. 81 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota GR Supra driven by Chandler Smith. As the two cars raced toward the inside of the track, Sieg’s car spun backwards. Then Smith’s car lightly bumped into Sieg’s No. 28 machine one last time. That was the final blow that sent Sieg’s car flying. In an instant, Sieg’s No. 28 machine pirouetted in the air before landing hard on the cover.

Sieg’s car hit the inside wall with the passenger door while upside down. The car then spun out of control, mimicking one of those old plastic tops we all spun as kids. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Sieg’s car got back on its wheels as it dug into the grass on the infield in turn 3.

Sieg had just come to terms with the fact that his car would probably end up upside down, which would have resulted in security forces having to take action to free him from the car. Fortunately, the car overturned, allowing Sieg to get out of the car as quickly as possible.

“When I rolled upside down, I just hoped it would stop. I thought I was going to land upside down, but luckily it landed just right,” Sieg said.

It was a disappointing and scary ending for Sieg, as he had driven one of his better races of his 69-race NASCAR Xfinity Series career. While his older brother Ryan Sieg took the Stage 1 win and finished 13th, the younger Sieg had also scored three stage points that day and was in 14th place on the final lap when all hell broke loose.

“It looked like a good finish for me,” said Sieg disappointedly. “We got some stage points in the first stage and I just hoped that we would finish well. You know how it is with the green-white-checkered cars. They get destroyed pretty quickly, but that’s exactly what happened.”

Now Sieg will dust himself off, as racers do, and prepare for next weekend’s NASCAR Xfinity Series Wawa 250 at Daytona International Speedway, a track more known for high-altitude crashes than Michigan. And guess what? He’ll do it without the fear of flying through the air swirling around in his head. Although racing has gotten safer in recent years, racers are still modern-day gladiators. We mere mortals think twice about getting behind the wheel in the days and weeks after a simple fender bender at a residential stop sign.

Racing drivers are simply wired differently.