NASCAR star Ross Chastain’s ‘wall-ride’ came straight from a Nintendo Gamecube

Stock car driver Ross Chastain on Sunday pulled off a desperate, slingshot pass of five cars on the last lap, rocketing from 10th place to 5th in the Xfinity 500 and barely staying alive in NASCAR’s elimination playoff series. Chastain revealed to pit reporters later that the maneuver was a direct result of his Nintendo GameCube childhood.

Chastain’s pass is called a “wall ride.” Basically, the field approaches a corner and everyone slows down to take it, except for one extremely motivated jackass who deliberately rides his car up into the wall, and uses that to brake and corner his vehicle while he slingshots around the more sensible drivers. Here’s a view taken from above. The crowd’s reaction is absolutely shocking.

“I have never seen anything like that before in my life!” one of NBC’s commentators gasped on the live telecast.

It’s important to note this happened at Martinsville, Virginia which is NASCAR’s shortest track and whose nicknames — “The Paperclip” and “Half Mile of Mayhem” — speak to the necessity of such white-knuckle gambles to get a result there. You can’t really do what Chastain did at a two-mile superspeedway, in other words, simply because the corners are too long and the cars carry a lot more speed into them.

Chastain told NBC that “I just hoped I didn’t catch the turn four access gate” — that is, slam into a concrete divider while going flat out. “But I was willing to do it,” Chastain said. He said he “played a lot of NASCAR 2005 on GameCube” with his brother, Chad; they would have been 11 and 6 years old, respectively, when that game launched.

It is important to note that not all wall rides work in videogames. Chase Briscoe, one of the drivers mowed down by Chastain’s daring move, drily noted on social media that video game drivers can very easily catch a seam or stray chunk of wall geometry and wipe out.

However, when the wall ride works it can be so destructive that you will have to get banned from serious racing platforms such as iRacingDriver behavior in this area is closely controlled and monitored. Briscoe stated that a wall ride was possible iRacing He was given a warning about ten years back. “It for sure works on there,” he said.

Stock car racers try a lot of dangerous stuff, and so far as we know NASCAR hasn’t penalized or sanctioned Chastain for his ingenuity here. So we’ll demur on whether this stunt is unfair or actually, seriously, endangers others in the field. We do know it is eye-goggling to see a professional driver attempt something that is straight out of a video game, where in the end no one gets hurt, no one cares what happens to the car, and you can always rage-quit or restart if it doesn’t work out.

Chastain didn’t have these options. Now he’s got one of the last four berths in next weekend’s season-ending NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway.