Drive to Stay Alive in Gear
There may be no more profound status report on the advancement of safety in stock car racing since the death of driver Dale Earnhardt than this: Jeff Gordon, Michael Waltrip, Ward Burton and Roy “Buckshot” Jones are alive.
Since Earnhardt died in the Daytona 500 on Feb. 18, all four NASCAR drivers have survived crashes into concrete walls at angles conducive to basilar skull fracture, the injury that killed Earnhardt.
And all four, unlike Earnhardt, were wearing head-restraint devices when they wrecked--Waltrip and Burton at Fontana on April 29, and Gordon and Jones at Lowe’s Motor Speedway near Charlotte, N.C., on May 19.
“What we’re seeing here is great success,” says motor racing safety scientist John Melvin, a Detroit biomechanical engineer. “Very significant progress has been made when you look at the number of people wearing the HANS [head-and-neck support system], the things they’re doing to strengthen seats, drivers going to six-point belts, and various configurations of nets [inside the driver compartment, to help limit head movement in crashes].”
More innovations are on the way:
* A revolutionary new seat, a sort of survival cell, has been developed through a joint effort of two Winston Cup teams and Ford Motor Co., and has been tested by Melvin at the bioengineering facilities of Wayne State University in Detroit.
* Two high-tech front-bumper systems are under development, and one, nicknamed the “Humpy Bumper” by designing engineer Paul Lew of Las Vegas, could be in use in races by mid-August, Lew says.
* A movement is quietly underway to establish a specialized traveling medical unit for NASCAR, the only major sanctioning body without one. Organizers of the effort say they’ve gotten positive responses from as high up as Jim France, younger brother of NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr.
* After lobbying by several drivers, especially three-time Winston Cup champion Gordon and two-time champion Terry Labonte, NASCAR officials acknowledge they are considering on-board crash-recorder devices, which have been in use since the mid-1990s in the two other top American motor racing bodies, Championship Auto Racing Teams Inc. and the Indy Racing League.
“I think that will come,” says Melvin, who designed and developed the first computerized crash recorders for the two open-wheel series. “But I wouldn’t imagine they could do it before next year.”
* And, although NASCAR President Mike Helton wouldn’t give details, he said, “We continue the testing we began last year on wall materials [for energy dissipating ‘soft walls’] and materials inside the car, and the configuration of those materials, in hopes something can be done to absorb the energy” of crashes.
NASCAR has mandated a minimum driver’s window height of 17 inches, to better accommodate the entry and rapid exit from cars by drivers who wear the HANS or other head-restraint systems. In Saturday night’s Pepsi 400 at Daytona International Speedway, all but 10 drivers in the 43-car field wore head restraints, a radical turnaround from the Daytona 500 in February, when only seven drivers wore them.
Altogether, there is more focus on safety innovation, by more drivers, teams, engineers and scientists, than ever before in the 53-year history of NASCAR.
“There’s a whole lot of people out there thinking about this,” Melvin said.
Helton says NASCAR is on schedule to announce results “in early August” of its highly publicized internal investigation of Earnhardt’s fatal accident--and that the deaths in 2000 of Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper have been “incorporated” into that investigation.
Skeptics, however, doubt that whatever NASCAR announces in August will be definitive, or even enlightening.
“I don’t expect a lot,” said Bruton Smith, chairman of Speedway Motor Sports Inc., the second-largest operator of racetracks, with six, on the Winston Cup tour. “I think we already have the answers.”
Said Wanda Ellen Wakefield, who has been studying the post-Earnhardt phenomenon from an academic perspective, “I don’t think we can rely on anything that comes out of this investigation because it is not an independent investigation, and it is not being conducted in the sunshine.”
Wakefield, an assistant professor of history at the State University of New York’s Brockport campus, near Rochester, specializes in sport and popular culture. She also has a law degree.
“If this was a criminal investigation, it would have to be thrown out,” Wakefield said. “The evidence [from Earnhardt’s crash] has been so tainted that we’ll never know [the precise circumstances].
“There is no independent outside body looking at [Earnhardt’s] car--never has been. We don’t know what they’ve done to the car [which NASCAR impounded and has kept out of public view since February]. We don’t know the whole story of this separated seat belt [in the car’s cockpit, which NASCAR announced five days after Earnhardt’s death].
“Not all the people who were there on the ground at the time, the first to get to Earnhardt in the car, were interviewed contemporaneously. NASCAR waited so long that memories have gotten all confused.”
Emergency medical technician Tommy Propst, who unfastened Earnhardt’s safety harness at the crash scene, was not interviewed by NASCAR until after he’d told the Orlando Sentinel in April that Earnhardt’s lap belt was intact when he arrived at the wrecked car.
“This is like the John F. Kennedy assassination in the way it’s just been muddied,” Wakefield said.
The only independent study regarding the accident has been of Earnhardt’s autopsy photographs, by Barry Myers, a court-appointed expert from Duke University.
Myers, who is both a biomechanical engineer and an M.D. specializing in head and neck injuries from car crashes, determined that the separated lap belt, even assuming it tore during the crash, had not caused Earnhardt’s fatal injuries.
Helton concedes that “our position of not speculating, or not answering those who do speculate, has led to the implication that we’re secretive and trying to create a conspiracy. And that’s unfortunate.”
Wakefield suspects NASCAR will keep its fan base, regardless of the residual mysteries in the wake of Earnhardt’s death, but said economic forces will continue to pressure NASCAR for better safety standards and practices.
“The working-class, traditional NASCAR fan is prepared to accept whatever NASCAR says,” Wakefield said.
“But I think folks who look at NASCAR more systematically, or as part of the larger American culture, are going to continue to wonder what happened. And I think sponsors ultimately are going to be very concerned to see that something serious is done.
“For example, all the money that was invested in creating the identity of the No. 3 Chevy [Earnhardt’s car] has essentially been thrown away. And look at all the soda machines, across the nation, that had his face on them. That is not a small matter. And corporations can’t lose that kind of money and not care why.”
Murky as the Earnhardt aftermath remains, the good news is that, where there had been four driver fatalities in a 10-month span in NASCAR’s three major series--Winston Cup, Busch Grand National and Craftsman trucks--there have been no deaths in any of those series since Earnhardt’s.
And the possibility that, without head restraints, there might have been as many as four more fatalities in Winston Cup alone since Earnhardt’s, “is certainly there,” Melvin said.
Gordon thanked God and the HANS for being able to walk away from his crash in The Winston all-star race at Charlotte.
“I hit at about the worst possible angle,” he said. “If you look at the right-front of that car, it took a big impact. My neck snapped really bad--it really stretched out there.”
Jones’ crash at Charlotte, even harder than Gordon’s, “really scared me,” Jones told https://CNNSI.com. “I knew it was going to hit hard. After it hit and I was still awake, I was, ‘Wow! All right!’ ”
Gordon complained of severe neck pain after the crash, and even “minor neck pain after a crash like that shows there was a pretty heavy load” of G forces, Melvin said.
Burton suffered a concussion in his crash at California Speedway, so the new head restraint he was wearing, developed by safety products manufacturer Bill Simpson, is undergoing further testing.
But the device “probably did him good,” Melvin said of Burton, in helping prevent deadly basilar skull fracture.
Gordon, Jones and Waltrip were all wearing the fully tested and proven HANS system when they crashed.
Without on-board crash recorders, “we don’t have objective data to say for sure that ‘this crash was as bad as that crash,’ ” Melvin said of comparing Earnhardt’s wreck to those of the four other drivers.
“But these were heavy crashes. The consensus is that Burton’s crash at California was a pretty darn hard hit. And Waltrip’s crash was pretty darn hard, even though it was more of a side impact.”
Waltrip was the only one who crashed at a side angle on the passenger side, which, Melvin pointed out, can be just as deadly as the right-front angle at which Earnhardt, Gordon and Jones hit. Veteran driver J.D. McDuffie died in 1991 of basilar skull fracture suffered in a passenger-side crash at Watkins Glen, N.Y.
Of crash recorders, Labonte said he’s been told by NASCAR officials that “They’re working on that right now.
“It’s real important that they have that,” Labonte continued. “That way, you can go back and see what really happened--how many Gs were pulled in a particular incident. If you don’t have that technology, you might as well stand up on the motor home in the infield and grab you another beer and say, ‘Yeah, boy! I can tell you how that one [wreck] was.’ ”
Gordon said of crash recorders, “I’ve always been in favor of them. I’ve talked to NASCAR about it, and I know they’re considering it. Now, it’s probably just a matter of how they get them, where they put them in, and making sure how they work.”
The recorders used on Indianapolis-type cars don’t translate directly to NASCAR applications because of radical differences in car construction.
“It’s not an insignificant job,” Melvin said of customizing recorders for NASCAR. “You’ve got to find a good place to mount them in the cars that gives you reliable data.”
But when and if the recorders are implemented in NASCAR, data may be gathered at a much faster rate than it has been in open-wheel cars, because “these guys are out there crashing all the time,” said engineer Tom Gideon, racing safety manager at General Motors.
NASCAR simply runs more laps, more races, with cars more tightly bunched and therefore more conducive to wrecking, than the open-wheel cars.
Development of high-tech energy absorbing bumpers has been slowed by lack of hard data from crashes.
“If you don’t have data, it makes development take longer,” Gideon said.
The Humpy Bumper--named for H.A. ‘Humpy” Wheeler, the Speedway Motor Sports Inc. president who came up with the concept--has been through some General Motors-funded crash testing in Detroit, and engineer Lew plans to spend about $1 million of his own money in intensive crash testing he hopes to have completed by the end of July.
Melvin believes the bumper’s developers “didn’t understand the problem at first,” but that “they’re learning quickly.”
The bumper is made of directionally engineered carbon fiber designed to channel crash energy away from drivers’ bodies.
Canadian engineers developing another type of front bumper, made of stabilized aluminum foam, have encountered difficulties in figuring out just how to attach their device to NASCAR chassis, and plan to confer with NASCAR, GM and Ford officials about possible reconfiguration of the chassis fronts.
Some computer modeling has indicated that the fronts of NASCAR chassis may behave very different from what has previously been suspected and that builders and drivers may be wrong in suspecting the fronts of the chassis are too rigid--indeed, that the opposite may be true.
The suspicion is that the fronts of the chassis may be crushing too rapidly, and that the real culprit in transferring crash energy to the driver’s body may be the sheer mass, rigidity and weight of the engine itself.
Team owner Robert Yates put the problem precisely, said one source, when Yates observed, “The car doesn’t know it’s hitting the wall until [the crushing during crashes] gets to the engine.”
Said another source, “The first piece of resistance you come to is the engine block. You have three feet of nothing [insufficient crushable material in the nose of the car] and then when it gets to the engine, it’s the end of the world. Because the engine is mounted to the same frame elements as the driver, when the engine hits the wall, the shock is passed directly to the driver.”
The solution, some engineers believe, will be mounting energy absorption materials directly on the front of the engine.
A proposal for a traveling medical unit is being developed, as a private, commercially funded venture, by two veteran marketing men on the NASCAR tour, Wes Beroth, formerly of Winston Cup series-sponsoring RJR, and Bill Borden, a longtime friend of Jim France.
Many observers have long believed NASCAR’s objection to a specialized medical unit is rooted in fear of liability for treating injured drivers, and Borden says his plan is designed “to insulate” NASCAR from liability.
He and Beroth are seeking private funding for their company, which would need only permission from NASCAR to operate their fully staffed unit at Winston Cup races.
Borden said he’s had conversations with Jim France, but has not yet appealed directly to Helton or to Bill France Jr.
France Jr., who only in recent years has transferred part of his power as czar of NASCAR to Helton, has long been considered the primary opponent of a specialized medical unit.
But, says a right-hand man of the NASCAR and International Speedway Corp. chairman, “It’s no longer out of the question with him.”
The survival-cell seat, developed by Ford and two NASCAR teams, PPI and Roush Racing, “is oversized and you fit the driver to it with bead foam,” said Melvin, who has supervised the testing. “It has been tested, and structurally it is very adequate. It does the work, but it hasn’t been tested by a driver to see if he can drive in it [comfortably]. So the next question is, is the configuration compatible with driving?”
And so, like the HANS, the seat will require some customizing and some getting used to by individual drivers.
Meanwhile, drivers and teams have come up with significantly more effective versions of NASCAR’s traditional aluminum-shell seats, Melvin said.
“Jeff Gordon’s got a pretty elaborate arrangement,” he added. “It’s aluminum, but it’s got shoulder and head support. A lot of teams have changed their seats, based on our advice, to make the shoulder and head support stronger. Also, there’s been a number of net arrangements people have come up with [inside the driver compartments] that add strength and support.”
And so, from the death of Dale Earnhardt, has come unprecedented effort toward keeping his peers, and future stock car drivers, alive.
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Making Stock Cars Safer
Since Dale Earnhardt’s death in February, there has been increased concern for driver safety in NASCAR. A look at technology in use or under development.
The HANS device
The HANS (head-and-neck-support) device is worn like a harness over the driver’s shoulders. Made of carbon fiber and Kevlar -- the same material used in bulletproof vests -- it is designed to prevent the whipping movement of a driver’s head during a crash.
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Black box
On-board crash-recorder devices are already in use on Indy-style and Formula One cars. The device records data during a crash, and the information helps determine what caused the wreck.
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Soft walls
The concrete walls that surround virtually every racetrack in America are designed to do one thing: keep cars from going into the stands. But they do little to protect drivers who slam into them at nearly 200 mph. In an effort to reduce driver injuries, engineers have started working on energy-absorbing barriers (so-called ‘soft walls’) for racetracks. To date, however, they have yet to build the perfect barrier: a wall that protects drivers and fans from every accident.
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HANS device
Harness straps run through grooves holding driver and device to seat
Strapped to helmet to prevent head movement
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Humpy Bumper
The graphite-fiber bumper is designed to absorb energy from a crash, lessening the chance of injury to the driver.
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Larger window opening
On Tuesday, NASCAR mandated a 17-inch window height on all cars to help those drivers wearing a head-restraint system quickly escape their cars. Of the 43 drivers in Saturday’s Pepsi 400, 37 were wearing the HANS device or another head-restraint system.
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Crash box
These aluminum-foam-filled tubes -- pieced together to form a ‘crash box’ -- absorb energy and help distribute stress and shock during a front-end crash. Aluminum foam is injected into an aluminum tube. This increases the amount of energy the tube can absorb during a crash.
Approximately 6 inches square
Aluminum tube
Aluminum foam
Five of these tubes form a single structure that is placed on the car’s frame in front of the radiator.
SOURCES: Chicago Tribune, Knight Ridder Tribune, HANS, Team Simpson Racing Inc., Hendrick Motorsports, Indy Racing League, University of Nebraska, Sentinel research