FORT WORTH, Texas -- The big wreck is over, the crumpled race cars have been loaded up and hauled off and the massive track in north Alabama has gone back into hibernation for another half a year. While the Sprint Cup tour has moved on from Talladega Superspeedway, the aftereffects of last weekend's accident involving Ryan Newman are still being felt.

Newman, who had to be cut out of his car after it flipped over and landed on its roof late in last Sunday's event, met with NASCAR vice president for competition Robin Pemberton and Sprint Cup director John Darby on Wednesday morning at the sport's Research and Development Center in Concord, N.C. The Stewart-Haas driver had two items on his agenda -- his prolonged extrication from the race car, which took roughly 15 minutes, and the kind of airborne accident that put him in that position in the first place.

"From an aerodynamic standpoint, ultimately, our biggest thing is to keep the race cars on the ground," Newman said Friday at Texas Motor Speedway, host of this weekend's NASCAR events. "Crashes have always been a part of racing. There are fans that like that. Sometimes that adds to extra excitement, don't get me wrong. When we can bounce off each other, get the car fixed, go back out and try to win a race, I understand that part of it. Keeping the race cars on the ground is how we keep the drivers, and especially the fans, safe."

NASCAR officials wouldn't discuss details of the meeting, other than to say it was positive.

"It was a good meeting," Darby said. "We explained a lot of things to Ryan, and Ryan took the time to walk us through step-by-step what he actually went through and felt as a driver, and that was good. At the end of the day, I think everything lined up pretty well."

It was the second consecutive Talladega race weekend involving a controversial airborne accident, and the second time this year a Sprint Cup driver has met with NASCAR officials over the issue. Carl Edwards met with unspecified NASCAR higher-ups in Daytona Beach, Fla., days after his car flew into the restraining fence at the end of Talladega's April race, a crash in which seven spectators were injured by debris.

Thankfully, Newman's car stayed out of the fence Sunday. But the driver still had concerns about why the vehicle lifted off to begin with, especially after seeing Mark Martin's car go into a roll during an accident a few laps later.

"I think there are for sure things that could be done and should be done based on what we saw, both [in] Mark's accident and my accident, [and] the spring accident with Carl," said Newman, who holds a degree in vehicle structural engineering from Purdue University. "Aerodynamically, there are things that need to be done to keep the cars on the ground. I said that six months ago. Six months is plenty of time to make those changes. The important thing is to make the right changes, to do the testing to the best of our capabilities with the tools that we have, meaning wind tunnels, modeling, things like that, to make the right difference." (Continued)