NASCAR Driver Tweets From Daytona 500 Raceway

This takes texting while driving to a whole new level.

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Tyler Barrick / Getty Images for NASCAR

Brad Keselowski, driver of the #19 Brad Keselowski Racing Dodge, stands on the grid at Daytona International Speedway on February 24, 2012 in Daytona Beach, Florida. His Twitter handle, @keselowski, is visible on his car.

In these modern times of Facebook, Twitter, and unlimited text messaging phone plans, you can be in constant communication with your friends and fans. People text in movie theaters, in class and whether or not they should be, people even text while driving. Up until now though, no one was tweeting from the driver’s seat of a race car in the middle of the Daytona 500.

Driver Brad Keselowski changed all that yesterday, when he posted messages on his Twitter account from the track of the Daytona 500. The race came to a screeching halt yesterday after driver Juan Pablo Montoya collided with a jet dryer truck. Both drivers are okay, but the race was delayed for clean up. The nearly two-hour hold up gave Keselowski some free time on the track — free time he used to update his fans while he waited for the race to resume.

(MORE: Driver Crashes Into Track Dryer, Creating Fiery Daytona Delay)

According to the Huffington Post, Keselowski tripled his number of followers, going from approximately 65,000 before the race to nearly 200,000, as word of his tweeting got out and the race got ready to resume running. Before starting his engines again, Keselowski wrote to his followers, “Time to get back racing, thank you for following!”

Keselowski also tweeted following a crash he was involved in to assure his followers that he was okay. He wrote, “Nothing we could do there. Never saw the wreck till we were windshield deep.”

In fitting tweet form, NASCAR noted that they will not punish Keselowski for the tweets, since they didn’t violate any rules. So are other NASCAR drivers going to be bringing their phones into the driver’s seat with them? Probably not, Keselowski tweeted:

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/keselowski/status/174340875332222976]

MORE: Sign of the Times: Bride Caught Texting During Her Own Wedding