WASHINGTON — The footage was replayed on TV all day, horrifying images of a 3,500-pound racecar taking flight, hurtling toward a packed grandstand before getting snared by a fence and slammed back onto Talladega Speedway in a mangled, flaming heap.

NASCAR driver Carl Edwards climbed out relatively unscathed. But seven spectators were injured by debris and an eighth was treated for chest pains brought on by witnessing the near debacle on the last lap of Sunday’s race at stock-car racing’s biggest and most treacherous track.

Monday, Edwards reiterated his belief that the racing at Talladega — in which carburetor restrictor plates limit horsepower to keep speeds at less than 200 mph — is needlessly dangerous for all concerned, bunching the cars in dense packs that invite multicar pileups.

“I feel like there is an unnecessary amount of risk to the drivers and to the fans with that type of show we’re putting on (at Talladega), which is not really a race,” Edwards said in an interview before visiting Capitol Hill to talk to lawmakers about the merits of Ford’s hybrid Fusion. “If there is a way to fix it, we have to do it. I don’t know what it is. But I can guarantee you that what we’re doing now is not doing the trick.”

Meantime, NASCAR officials assured reporters that safety was their top priority but expressed little interest in ordering modifications to the 2.66-mile superspeedway, which has been controversial from the day it opened in 1969, its high banks and treacherous speeds sparking the only driver boycott in NASCAR history.

Instead, NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter shifted responsibility for Sunday’s near calamity to the drivers involved, saying on a conference call that officials may start penalizing “drivers who blatantly block and abuse the bump-drafting rules.”

Edwards’s No. 99 Ford spun sideways on the last lap Sunday after getting nudged by Brad Keselowski, running second. Edwards’ car popped in the air, and its roof flaps deployed, which should have created enough down force to plant the car on the track. But Edwards was hit a second time, and the impact punted him skyward and into the fence.

Immediately afterward, he joined a litany of drivers who have criticized so-called “restrictor-plate racing,” which NASCAR mandated at its two biggest tracks after Bobby Allison’s car got airborne at Talladega in 1987 and ripped down a section of the front-stretch fence.

“I guess we’ll do this until somebody gets killed, and then we’ll change it,” Edwards said Sunday.

With its eerie similarity to Allison’s crash, Edwards’ wreck raised new questions about whether NASCAR is doing enough to ensure the safety of its drivers and spectators.

While Hunter said it was “extremely unfortunate that a few fans suffered minor injuries” at Talladega, he said the key safety devices — the front-stretch fence and roof flaps on Edwards’ car — worked properly.

“Nothing is bulletproof,” Hunter said, adding that NASCAR officials would analyze the wreck from every angle to see if anything more should be done.

“We will make it as safe as we humanly can,” he added.

The wreck also reopened the unsavory question at the heart of NASCAR’s popularity: Do wrecks “sell”?

NASCAR officials certainly believe that dramatic finishes “sell.” At Talladega, that almost certainly means crashes.

There are multiple options for making the racing safer at Talladega.

One is to reduce the size of the restrictor plates, which cut horsepower from roughly 800 to 400. Another is to build smaller engines.

Some have suggested erecting higher fences and moving spectators farther back. Others argue that the only solution is reducing the 33-degree banks. A gentler bank would automatically slow the cars.

John Darby, NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series director, balked at the latter idea Monday, equating any move to reduce Daytona’s and Talladega’s high banks to turning “historical, exciting racetracks” into “flat parking lots.”

In other words, a certain amount of danger lies at the heart of racing, and a neutered NASCAR wouldn’t sell many tickets.

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