STUBBORN OL’ BOYS

Mario Andretti awakens a split-second before dying.

“I still wake up from dreams that I am crashing, or that I’m upside down--things I used to dread and fear,” he says.

Andretti is 60.

“Thank God I survived that era.”

In his time, he did it all: dirt-track stock cars, sprint cars, midget cars, Indy cars, prototype sports cars, NASCAR, Formula One. He won it all: the Indy 500, the Daytona 500, the world driving championship. . . .

And he lived to tell about it.

He cannot count the friends who didn’t.

“At the beginning of a season, I would look around at a drivers’ meeting and I would think, ‘I wonder who’s not going to be here at the end,’ ” he says. “There were years when we lost as many as six guys.”

A young Emerson Fittipaldi would glance around the starting grid at the Formula One Grand Prix of Monaco each spring and see 22 drivers.

“We all knew the odds,” he says. “Three of us would not survive the season.”

Secret Society

Racing was a dangerous business in those days and probably always will be, but it isn’t as dangerous as it used to be. Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART), the Indy Racing League (IRL) and Formula One, the open-cockpit racing organizations, have taken the lead in safety research and development, in conjunction with manufacturers such as General Motors, Ford Motor Co., DaimlerChrysler and independent racing-safety experts.

Those organizations have specialized, traveling medical units.

Beginning this season, Formula One will require its drivers to wear the HANS--head and neck support system--in all races, and CART will require it in its oval-track events.

The IRL has been the leader in funding for developing “soft wall” technology, and CART is beginning a revolutionary study to determine precisely what happens to a driver’s brain during a wreck.

NASCAR, the stock car organization that sanctions by far the most--and most popular--racing in the United States, has no traveling medical unit. It relies on local doctors to staff its trackside medical facilities.

International Speedway Corp., which operates 13 tracks on this year’s Winston Cup tour, and is controlled by the France family of Daytona Beach, which also owns NASCAR outright, refuses to divulge the credentials, or even the names, of those doctors and emergency workers.

And although NASCAR maintains it has been active in safety research and development, its officials are secretive about safety research.

NASCAR President Mike Helton said recently that the organization’s expenditures on safety research and development this year will reach “seven figures,” but added, “I am just not prepared to, or desire to, sit here today and tell you exactly what is going on. . . .”

NASCAR does not require its drivers to wear the HANS, even though all three of its driver fatalities last year were attributed by medical examiners to injuries associated with violent head movement.

Why not?

“Because we are not through the understanding process,” Helton said. “The ergonomics inside these stock cars are different,” meaning there is more room for head and body movement than in the confining cockpits of F1 and Indy cars.

“We have made different efforts of wall testing, and different mechanical pieces of cars . . . and I don’t feel like it’s proper to say much further,” Helton said, maintaining that NASCAR conducts much of its testing “off-track” at scientific facilities “all over the country.”

The only NASCAR-initiated safety research project that came to light last year was at New Hampshire International Speedway in Loudon, after two drivers, Adam Petty, on May 12, and Kenny Irwin, on July 7, had been killed in the third turn of that one-mile oval.

NASCAR announced after the fact that it had tested some sort of soft walls but revealed neither details nor results.

The tests, sources say, involved driverless old cars with their throttles tied down, crashed into Styrofoam blocks placed against the concrete walls.

NASCAR has announced no changes in wall requirements stemming from the tests.

Neither has NASCAR divulged the findings of its internal investigations into the two fatal crashes at the track.

Loudon Police Chief Robert Fiske criticized NASCAR for removing evidence from the track before police arrived. The cars were removed almost immediately and were either buried (Petty’s) or destroyed (Irwin’s), reportedly out of respect for the deceased.

Police weren’t on the scene at all after Petty’s crash, and made it to the Irwin crash site two hours afterward, when practice had already been resumed.

Fiske said he “couldn’t possibly pinpoint whose [skid marks] were whose,” and that the walls had already been repainted when he arrived. Otherwise, he said, he could have determined the exact speed, the angle, the route the car traveled and other details of the accident, as his department does in every “untimely” death in his jurisdiction.

Steve Olvey, a University of Miami specialist in neurosurgical intensive care, is medical director of CART, and former medical director of Homestead-Miami Speedway, a track NASCAR uses.

Said Olvey: “In talking with [NASCAR] and working what little I’ve worked with them, you get the impression that they’re just really not interested in the safety issues.”

Protecting the Fans

Argues Gary Nelson, NASCAR’s chief technical officer, “Safety is No. 1 on our list. It has always been No. 1 on our list. Our record proves it is No. 1 on our list.”

Spectator safety has appeared to be a priority.

In 1987, after a car almost flew into the grandstands at the Talladega superspeedway in Alabama, NASCAR mandated carburetor restrictor plates for Talladega and the next-fastest track, Daytona International Speedway, to keep speeds under 200 mph and to keep cars from going airborne during accidents.

Then in the early ‘90s, NASCAR developed and mandated roof flaps, which open as a car spins, to help keep it on the ground.

After three spectators were killed by flying debris at a CART race in 1998, and three more died at an IRL race in 1999, NASCAR--even though it had had no spectator deaths at its races--mandated tethering cables to keep wheels and hoods anchored to cars during crashes.

Driver safety?

As early as 1985, the International Council of Motorsports Sciences tried to establish a universal database on trauma and fatalities among all racing organizations, hoping to apply scientific approaches to prevention.

“As good as the idea sounds, it never got going,” said Olvey, one of the organization’s founders. “Some of the sanctioning bodies” didn’t want to provide their data.

Was NASCAR one?

“They were the primary ones,” Olvey said.

Helton counters: “We are no less interested in safety than anybody else,” declining to be specific.

“We understand the price. There is speculation: ‘Why are they not doing it? Why won’t they tell us about it?’

“It’s such a complicated process to be certain that what you are working on is well represented. If you go out and publicize what you are doing, people may become uncertain or unclear.”

Formula One, however, is open about its safety research.

“It’s our obligation to make sure that drivers are given maximum safety,” F1 team owner Eddie Jordan said. “It’s not just lip service.”

In Formula One, Sid Watkins, chief of neurology at City of London hospital, heads a medical team that travels worldwide to Grand Prix races.

CART has eight physicians on its medical team, headed by Olvey and his chief orthopedic consultant, Terry Trammell of Indianapolis. They work in a $1.5-million mobile surgical and intensive care unit that is “850 square feet, and like a regular emergency room or intensive care unit,” Olvey said. “We’re able to do what we need to do.”

Their budget is more than $1 million a year and they know every driver and his medical history. They can and have performed major procedures right in the cockpits at crash scenes.

Medical records of NASCAR drivers are carried from track to track by administrative personnel. Other than that, medical and emergency responses are left up to individual tracks.

“We maintain that the smartest, most efficient, best providers of care are those who work on the interstates all week long,” Helton said.

He also said local medical teams hired by individual tracks have better working relationships with local hospitals.

For more than a decade, major corporations have offered to underwrite specialized traveling medical teams for NASCAR, similar to those in CART and F1. Each offer has been refused because of NASCAR’s fear of liability for medical treatment of drivers, sources say.

Of the other racing series’ acceptance of responsibility, NASCAR Chairman Bill France Jr. has said, “They have their legal advisors and we have ours.”

Said Olvey: “It is my opinion that, in view of the fact that all other major motor sports sanctioning bodies have dedicated, in-house medical and safety teams, it leaves NASCAR as an outlier, by virtue of the fact that they continue to leave matters of safety up to the individual drivers and tracks.”

Olvey recalls conversations with NASCAR drivers that appalled him during his tenure at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

“When I would talk to these guys at Homestead, in the Busch series and the truck series, they did not know what I thought were common beliefs regarding safety that [CART] guys have known for a long time,” he said.

Olvey and other experts cite specific matters, such as padding inside the driver compartments, seat placement and attachment to the chassis, and attachment of the safety harnesses to the chassis.

Some NASCAR drivers “honestly were not aware of it because no one had ever talked to them about these things,” Olvey said. “They said, ‘Oh, my God, if I had known that, I would have done this years ago.’ ”

Getting the Facts

NASCAR drivers got another awakening last month, beginning with a safety seminar Ford conducted for its drivers during testing at Daytona.

Most drivers were shocked by evidence of how much punishment their bodies are exposed to during crashes.

Drivers were told that of the eight NASCAR racing deaths in the last 10 years, the HANS probably would have saved all of them.

“We were all kind of shocked,” driver Jimmy Spencer said. “It bothers you. You don’t want to be the ninth.”

For years, the HANS device was considered too bulky and confining. But NASCAR has taken no role in developing the device, which has been refined into smaller, more practical versions, thanks to research by Mercedes-Benz, General Motors and Ford.

The HANS was invented nearly 20 years ago by Robert Hubbard, professor of biomechanical engineering at Michigan State. He got the idea in conversation with his brother-in-law, Atlanta sports car driver Jim Downing, who realized that a lack of head restraint was responsible for many racing injuries.

The HANS has been available to drivers in all forms of racing since 1991.

“Gary Nelson knew about it before he became the technical guy at NASCAR [in 1992],” Hubbard said.

Ford and GM engineers have been encouraging their NASCAR drivers to wear the HANS since Irwin became the second NASCAR fatality of the season last July.

John Melvin, a Detroit biomechanical engineer and an authority on racing injuries, says the HANS “certainly would have helped” Adam Petty and Irwin.

NASCAR maintained for months that it did not forbid use of the HANS, and Helton said officials now encourage drivers to wear it.

Ford has told its drivers that it will pay the $1,275 for the device. So far, 21 Winston Cup drivers have bought it, but how many will actually use it in the season-opening Daytona 500 on Sunday remains uncertain.

Many NASCAR drivers say the HANS is too confining--that while solving one problem, it might create others, such as limiting their ability to look around, or hindering quick exit from cars in emergencies such as fire.

Scientists studying in-car camera videotapes, however, say NASCAR drivers may not move their heads as much as they think they do.

Brett Bodine, who began wearing the HANS in July, has found “no negatives about it.”

His brother Todd, who is working with safety entrepreneur Bill Simpson on a fire suit that incorporates head protection for the driver, was shocked by a video shown during the safety sessions.

“I didn’t realize you could move that much in a crash,” he said. “You see these dummies in the video, wearing the same five-point belts [as the drivers do], and they’re moving all over the place. It makes you realize we’ve got to do more to protect ourselves.”

Hubbard suspects his safety restraint could have been in widespread use “quite a bit faster” with more concerted effort and funding.

“The HANS device isn’t my day job,” said Hubbard, who taught full time in the engineering and medical schools at Michigan State and developed the HANS in his spare time at his own expense.

“We’d go for months or years without really doing anything” to refine it.

Melvin said CART had only “a sort of background interest in the HANS” until CART rookie Gonzalo Rodriguez was killed at the road course at Laguna Seca in September 1999, that accident followed seven weeks later by the death of rising star Greg Moore at California Speedway in Fontana.

Real Shock Absorbers

Soft walls, made of crushable but resilient materials such as polyethylene or high-density Styrofoam, have proved to be life savers in experimental forms. Such barriers, which would replace or cover traditional concrete retaining walls, significantly dissipate the enormous energy created by crashes before the horrific shock can reach drivers’ bodies.

The fledgling IRL has been funding the best soft wall currently under development.

NASCAR does not provide tangible evidence of being anything other than an observer of the project--the Polyethylene Energy Dissipation System (PEDS)--being directed by former GM safety engineer John Pierce.

“That group based in Daytona makes a lot of money,” said Pierce, alluding to NASCAR and International Speedway Corp. “I don’t know why they aren’t doing anything. Maybe they are, behind the scenes.”

Helton maintains NASCAR is indeed working behind the scenes. But again, no specifics.

Highway safety expert John Fitch of Lime Rock, Conn., can’t find money to build a prototype of what he thinks could be the most practical soft wall yet for oval tracks, where the need is greatest.

Called a “compression barrier,” Fitch’s concept would put cushioning devices, such as tires, against existing concrete walls at intervals, then cover the cushions with a smooth surface that would give at any point of impact, then return to its previous shape.

But the concept remains only a model in the computers and mind of Fitch, who invented those yellow, sand-filled plastic barrels you see in front of bridge abutments on highways nationwide.

Fitch says he has yet to get an audience with NASCAR or any other racing organization.

“Most of the officials are company men with their own agenda,” he said. “They have to comply with corporate policy.”

Surprisingly, the most resounding call for improvement has come from NASCAR’s most notoriously macho driver, seven-time Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt. He has a terse rebuttal to the long-running excuse of racing moguls that soft walls would fragment and require too much cleanup time during races:

“I’d rather they spend 20 minutes cleaning up that mess than cleaning me off the wall,” he said.

Last year, when sticking throttles and concrete walls--the two bottom-line causes of the deaths of Petty and Irwin--were the hottest issues in NASCAR, Nelson, NASCAR’s technical chief, was asked if specialized engineers would be brought in to study the situation.

“I think the best specialized engineers are the guys in this garage area [mechanics and pit crewmen], who build these cars every day and understand them,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anybody who understands them better.”

In fact, NASCAR mechanics “are the least technically savvy of all the people we deal with,” said a source close to a major manufacturer that participates in several forms of racing.

Last summer, when NASCAR and its member tracks were under enormous pressure to do something, officials of Lowe’s Motor Speedway near Charlotte, N.C., broke with the secrecy tradition and conducted a test open to the public. They dropped an old Cadillac, nose first, from a crane onto a sheet of fabric-covered foam padding.

The test was privately frowned on by NASCAR as a public-relations stunt, but it was “more scientific” than what NASCAR did at New Hampshire, said a Detroit engineer.

Unlike CART and F1, NASCAR does not require sophisticated computerized systems that keep throttles from sticking and automatically shut off the engine if the throttle does stick.

After the deaths of Petty and Irwin, NASCAR did mandate a “kill switch” within reach of drivers’ thumbs on the steering wheels. Previously, the only way a NASCAR driver could shut off his engine was with a toggle switch on the dash.

NASCAR said it had made the decision on the kill switch scientifically.

Driver Wally Dallenbach Jr. would question that.

A former sports-car racer, he had brought the steering wheel-mounted kill switch with him into NASCAR from road racing, where it was commonly used for years. NASCAR officials “came and looked at mine” during a test session at Indianapolis Motor Speedway last July, said Dallenbach, and “two weeks later they made it mandatory.”

Even so, drivers maintained that they wouldn’t have the instantaneous reaction to use the new kill switch.

Weeks later, Winston Cup points leader Bobby Labonte crashed hard with a stuck throttle at Darlington, S.C. He was badly shaken and said there had been no time to hit the switch.

NASCAR officials examined Labonte’s car but couldn’t determine why his or any other drivers’ throttles were sticking.

Formula One, CART and IRL analyze their serious crashes with scientific data gathered by physicians and biomechanical engineers. This data is applied to safety innovations. With data from crash recorders mounted on all their cars, the other major organizations have radically improved the safety of their cars, documented the worth of head-restraint devices and soft walls, and developed new seats that are better at supporting the body and absorbing energy during crashes.

NASCAR records no crash data and does no computer modeling, even though “We’ve offered the ‘blue boxes’ to them for I don’t know how many years,” a Ford source said.

Nelson says he doesn’t get the importance of the crash recorder.

“It tells you how hard someone has hit the wall, but that’s about all it tells you,” he said.

Safety experts familiar with crash recorders are astounded at that remark.

“Say you have a particular crash in NASCAR, and you have good data,” said CART’s Olvey. “Then you do a computer model with that data. Say you adjust the computer model so that you move the seat over to the right four inches.

“Then, you redo the crash in the model. It might show that the driver wouldn’t have had any injuries. Or it might show there would have been worse injuries. But at least you have a safe way to try the crashes, using different equipment and placement.”

That is precisely the method CART used to determine that Rodriguez’s death from a classic basal skull fracture would have been prevented by the HANS, and mandated the device.

Ultra-strong seats, survival capsules that thoroughly support drivers’ bodies in the most violent wrecks, already are in place in all the world’s top racing leagues, except NASCAR.

Some NASCAR drivers, led by Jeff Burton, have taken it upon themselves--with enthusiastic backing from Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler--to organize funding and research on better seats for the Winston Cup series. But Burton figures that not even prototypes of the new seats will be available until well into this season.

Head Games?

Helmets soon may be redesigned--not only for racing, but for public recreational use--at the conclusion of a new project to determine precisely what happens to drivers’ brains during wrecks.

Olvey conceived the idea after more than 20 years of observation that, no matter how violent the crash, the only pieces of driver apparel that consistently remained in place were the earpieces through which drivers received radio communications from their pits.

Olvey also understood that the ear is an invaluable nonsurgical path to direct observation of what happens to the brain during traumatic events such as crashes.

This season, his concept will unfold as a joint project of CART, the U.S. Air Force, Motorola and Racing Radios Inc., the Atlanta supplier of communications equipment to most North American racing series.

“We’ll wait and see how it all comes out,” said NASCAR’s Helton. “In the meantime, we have a relationship with Motorola and Racing Radios. Just because we’re not directly involved in it doesn’t mean we don’t know the results of it.”

Doesn’t Helton see any value in active NASCAR participation in the study?

“Not yet,” he said.

As for computerized crash recorders and throttle shutoffs, Helton said NASCAR fears such devices would lead to computer cheating.

But don’t the other organizations, which allow various on-board computers, have to police high-tech cheating as well?

“They’re set up to police it,” Helton said. “We are not.”

Mechanical simplicity and rugged self-reliance of individual drivers and teams are part of what makes NASCAR the most popular motor sport organization in the United States. NASCAR was built on the idea of racing cars that were similar to what the public could buy and drive.

NASCAR technology, however, has fallen behind that used even in passenger cars--let alone the other, more technologically advanced racing series.

Winston Cup’s Burton believes NASCAR “could be more proactive,” but adds, “One of the problems with Winston Cup racing isn’t with NASCAR. It’s with the drivers and the teams. I can walk through a garage area [at any Winston Cup track] and show you experienced race drivers, even Winston Cup champions, who have no head restraints on their seats, who have their seat-belt brackets mounted 100% wrong.

“I could point out no less than five. Why is that? It’s because people in this series are hardheaded about safety matters. They believe in the status quo.”

Status quo is largely a matter of fatalism, a belief among drivers that the time of a person’s death is preordained, without regard to safety. Soon after Adam Petty had died, one of his best friends among drivers, Dale Earnhardt Jr., put it this way: “As a driver, you’re not concerned so much with how it happened as that it happened.”

Even more telling was the view of Richard Petty, NASCAR’s winningest driver with 200 victories, toward his grandson’s death: “I don’t blame the car, the track, NASCAR, myself, Kyle [Adam’s father, Richard’s son] or anybody. It was just meant to be.”

Multiple tragedy, involving at least one high-profile driver, historically has been required to get racing organizations moving on safety.

“The single occurrence, every so often, can sort of fail to get people’s attention,” safety engineer Melvin says. “But two, close together, can really get everybody’s attention.”

It took the deaths of legendary Formula One driver Ayrton Senna and rookie Roland Ratzenberger on the same weekend in 1994 at Imola, Italy, to spur Grand Prix racing into a safety revolution that has left F1 without a driver fatality since.

It took the deaths of Rodriguez and Moore in ’99 to push CART to mandate the HANS.

Now, motor racing’s focus is on NASCAR.

“It should be,” the retired, legendary Andretti said grimly. “It should be.”

Added his son, CART driver Michael, “NASCAR has got to take the lead. They’re the ones who are bringing in the big income for the tracks, and they’re the ones who can make the call. Until that happens, nothing’s going to happen.”

Ultimately, money will be the impetus, rather than the impediment, to change, Mario Andretti said.

Racing has become enormously dependent on corporate sponsors, who are increasingly demanding cleaner public images.

“Sponsors want to celebrate,” Mario Andretti says. “They don’t want to mourn.”

There is no greater evidence than the intensified roles of Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler at Daytona as NASCAR opens a new season.

John Melvin, after 30 years of laboring in obscurity for racing safety, has suddenly become the scientific guru of the fatalistic NASCAR drivers.

Melvin and other engineers are convincing the tough old boys that their times need not come so soon, that what is meant to be is the advent of the HANS, called by racing-savvy physicians and engineers the most important piece of racing safety apparel since the crash helmet.

“To some extent,” Hubbard says, “the revolution has started.”

And so Adam Petty, fourth-generation driver, dead at 19, with not a single Winston Cup victory to his credit, may yet go down in history as the most important racing Petty of them all.