David Malukas felt his No. 12 Chevrolet snap loose in Turn 2 at Nashville Superspeedway, watched the wall arrive faster than he could correct for, and braced as the car backed hard into the SAFER barrier. His right knee took the hit meant for the chassis. It struck the steering wheel with enough force to knock the wheel clean off its column. Nineteen hours later, he strapped into a backup car and turned the fastest lap of final practice.
“Everything is good,” Malukas said from the infield care center before the crash had even finished being replayed on broadcast. “Thankfully, everything came back clean. Nothing’s broken. Nothing’s torn. Which is pretty impressive because I literally took the wheel off with my knee. I couldn’t believe that. It’s just badly bruised.”
Twenty Minutes Into Practice, Everything Changed
The crash happened roughly twenty minutes into Saturday’s opening practice session on Nashville’s 1.33-mile concrete oval, when Malukas lost the rear of the car mid-corner and speared the outside wall. The impact destroyed the back of the Team Penske entry and left Malukas needing to be extracted with his knee having absorbed a hit engineers were still trying to understand days later.
“It just snapped on me,” Malukas said, working through the sequence out loud. “I didn’t help myself with the tools. I was getting a lot of push on entry, so I kept moving that front sway bar, and obviously mid-corner went into Turn 1 and had a big snap. It could have been many different things, but very, very unfortunate.”
He was taken to a local hospital by private vehicle rather than ambulance, alert and in good spirits according to INDYCAR’s medical team. X-rays and scans came back clean: no fractures, no torn ligaments, just a badly bruised knee that had done something doctors told him they wanted to study further. “I was talking with the medical team, and they said actually I’m not the first person to have that, and it seems this is a new occurrence that’s happening,” Malukas said. “So they took pictures of everything, and they’re going to study it.”
A Backup Car and a Nine-Spot Penalty
The crash cost Malukas more than a sore knee. It cost him qualifying entirely. Team Penske spent hours trying to rebuild a car capable of running Saturday night’s final practice, and INDYCAR rules would have allowed the team to field a substitute driver, journeyman Conor Daly, for qualifying purposes. But when the backup car was not ready in time, and with INDYCAR informing the team it could not swap drivers twice in one weekend, that option disappeared. Malukas was always going to start Sunday’s race from the back of the field regardless of the crash. He had already been assessed a nine-spot grid penalty for using his fifth engine of the season, meaning even a clean practice would have left him starting well outside the top ten.
What mattered more than track position was whether he could physically get back in the car at all. INDYCAR medical officials watched him climb in and out of the cockpit without visible difficulty before clearing him to compete, with Dr. Angi Fiege of the series’ medical team giving him a thumbs up as he emerged. Malukas did not wear a brace or a wrap. He simply got back in and, in that Saturday night session, posted the third-fastest lap on the board.
“Honestly, I felt really good,” he told reporters afterward. “The medical team got me sorted out, and obviously a little bit of adrenaline I’m running on there. Honestly, with the knee, all the pain is with movement. And in the car, my knee is at full extension, so there’s no pain. It’s pretty funny, it’s painful getting in and out. But once you’re in it, it’s great.”
The Long Road Back From a Wrist That Would Not Heal
This was not the first time Malukas has had to talk his way back into a race car through an injury most drivers would use as an excuse to sit out. In 2023, a mountain biking accident left him with a fractured and dislocated left wrist just as he was preparing to join Arrow McLaren. He underwent surgery in February of that year, then four or five more procedures as the injury refused to cooperate. Some weeks looked promising. Others did not. He described starting his recovery by moving grains of rice through his fingers, a task so basic it would have seemed absurd to the driver he had been only months earlier, now reduced to relearning fine motor control one grain at a time.
Arrow McLaren released him after he missed four races recovering from that injury, before he ever turned a competitive lap for the team. It was the kind of setback that ends careers quietly, without headlines, as a promising young driver simply stops appearing on entry lists. Instead, Malukas rebuilt. He ran ten races in 2024 with Meyer Shank Racing once the wrist had healed enough to grip a wheel at speed. That stretch was enough to earn him a full-time seat with AJ Foyt Racing for 2025, where he delivered a career-best 11th-place points finish, five top-ten results, and a runner-up finish at the Indianapolis 500 that announced he had fully arrived.
That résumé is what put him in the No. 12 Team Penske Chevrolet for 2026, at 24 years old the youngest full-time driver in franchise history and only the second to sit behind that particular wheel. Fourth in the championship standings entering Nashville, Malukas has spent his first season with the sport’s most decorated team proving the wrist injury was a detour, not a dead end.
Getting Back In
Sunday’s Music City Grand Prix asked something different of him than pure speed. Starting at the rear with a knee that hurt every time he moved but not at all once he was strapped in at full extension, Malukas had nothing to lose and, in his own telling, no reason to treat the night as anything other than a race he intended to finish strong. The steering wheel that had been ripped from its column less than a full day earlier was replaced. The knee stayed wrapped in nothing but adrenaline and clearance paperwork.
Drivers talk often about mental toughness in the abstract, about pushing through discomfort for the sake of points and championships. Malukas has now built two separate comebacks, two years apart, on the same foundation: get back in the car as soon as the doctors allow it, and let the results speak instead of the injury report. A team that gambled on him after a wrist that took four surgeries to trust again just watched him climb out of a car that took his knee out from under him and go be the third-fastest driver on the property that same night.
