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http://www.nascar.com/2008/news/opinion/03/05/jgordon.dcaraviello.safer.barrier.vegas/index.html
Impact of Gordon's crash may be felt beyond LVMS
Jeff Gordon is not a driver prone to overstatement. In his earlier years he made a habit of steering clear of controversy -- advice he later imparted to protégé and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson -- because he believed that such distractions ultimately had a negative effect on performance behind the wheel. Even now, with four championships and 81 race wins and his legacy secured, he's not one to shoot off at the mouth. He tends to pick his battles carefully. But when he picks one, look out.
That's what happened Sunday, when outside the Las Vegas Motor Speedway care center on a windy, raw evening he scolded track management for not having a Steel and Foam Energy Reduction (SAFER) barrier on the part of the inside backstretch wall that his Chevrolet had plowed into moments earlier. The four-time champion said that he was "very disappointed" in the racetrack -- simple, measured, emotionless words that carried the weight of a sledgehammer.
Car owner Rick Hendrick joined in Tuesday, telling The Associated Press that NASCAR shouldn't compete at the 1.5-mile facility again until all the walls are covered in the energy-absorbent polystyrene foam. Track officials have issued promises to review the situation and make changes where necessary. And Wednesday, far from the din and recriminations, the data from the crash recorder within Gordon's No. 24 car will land on the desk of the man most qualified to make those decisions. Then the evaluation process will truly begin.
Dean Sicking, director of the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, helped to develop the SAFER barrier, which has become -- along with Bob Hubbard and Jim Downing's Head and Neck Support (HANS) device -- one of the most important life-saving tools in modern auto racing. It went up at all NASCAR tracks in 2004, on the heels of a spate of fatalities and debilitating injuries in the sport's national divisions. It's done its job masterfully, allowing driver upon driver to walk away from terrible accidents that in the past might have also come with a tremendous human cost.
But, as Gordon's spinning, right-front hit on Sunday clearly illustrated, not every wall at every speedway is SAFER than it could be. Four years ago, in the scramble to add soft walls to every track, Sicking's team gave each facility a preliminary evaluation. They looked at historical records, found the points on each racetrack where the hardest impacts had occurred over the past five to seven years, and covered them with the barrier. The walls left bare were those in areas that, according to the historical data, offered the lowest probability of big hits.
But a racecar traveling in excess of 150 mph can do strange things. It can hit things it's not supposed to hit. Just ask Jeff Fuller, who two years ago hammered a bare stretch of inside wall during a then-Busch race at Kentucky Speedway in almost the same manner Gordon did at Las Vegas on Sunday, crashing into an opening that made the impact worse than it should have been. He suffered a broken finger and a broken wrist. "There should be something done to make that safer," he said at the time.
Taking his side
Jeff Gordon voiced his displeasure that Las Vegas Motor Speeedway did not have SAFER barriers on its inside walls, and others agreed.
Now, maybe, there will be. It's not uncommon, Sicking said, for a problem area in one track to spur changes in other facilities of similar type and design. "That has happened, yes," he said Tuesday by cell phone. "Similar tracks behave very similarly. Let's say we stopped the barrier a couple of hundred feet short. Then we could go back and look at extending all comparable tracks."
So it's very conceivable that Gordon's crash at Las Vegas, and the outcry afterward, could lead to protected inside backstretch walls -- and, hopefully, reconfigured infield access points -- at all 1.5-mile tri-ovals, which are the meat and potatoes of the Sprint Cup schedule. The impact of Gordon's accident may eventually be felt not just in Las Vegas, but in Atlanta, Texas, Kansas and other points far beyond.
It all comes down to the data. Steve Peterson, NASCAR's technical director and resident safety expert, presented the crash data from Gordon's car to a colleague of Sicking's on Tuesday, who was expected to relay it to the MWRSF director Wednesday. Those numbers will give the scientists in Nebraska an accurate picture of the accident's severity, which sometimes can be very different from what the driver feels. "If it's significant enough to lead us to believe there's a high risk of reduced safety or fatality," Sicking said, "we'll recommend full barrier."
When NASCAR detects a hard hit on an uncovered part of a racetrack, Sicking said, the crash data is sent to Nebraska where MWRSF engineers search for a reasonable alternative. Sometimes it's reconfiguring an area -- like a wall opening -- sometimes it's extending the barrier, and sometimes it's both. And if a change is necessary at one type of track, it's often necessary at all tracks of that same shape and dimension.
"Similar tracks should get similar treatment, we believe," Sicking said, "unless we identify something unique about Vegas. We'll go through all the drawings and photos to make sure there's not something unique about it. If there was something unique that caused this crash that's not present at its sister tracks around the nation, then we would just recommend it for Vegas. But that is the exception rather than the rule."
And hopefully it's a step toward complete coverage at all racetracks, the only way to prevent the heartbreaking possibility of a driver being injured -- or worse -- in a collision with an unprotected wall when the technology existed to prevent it. Toward that end, the impact of Gordon's crash may be much bigger than it appeared on Sunday. He just might have taken one for the entire garage.
Impact of Gordon's crash may be felt beyond LVMS
Jeff Gordon is not a driver prone to overstatement. In his earlier years he made a habit of steering clear of controversy -- advice he later imparted to protégé and Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson -- because he believed that such distractions ultimately had a negative effect on performance behind the wheel. Even now, with four championships and 81 race wins and his legacy secured, he's not one to shoot off at the mouth. He tends to pick his battles carefully. But when he picks one, look out.
That's what happened Sunday, when outside the Las Vegas Motor Speedway care center on a windy, raw evening he scolded track management for not having a Steel and Foam Energy Reduction (SAFER) barrier on the part of the inside backstretch wall that his Chevrolet had plowed into moments earlier. The four-time champion said that he was "very disappointed" in the racetrack -- simple, measured, emotionless words that carried the weight of a sledgehammer.
Car owner Rick Hendrick joined in Tuesday, telling The Associated Press that NASCAR shouldn't compete at the 1.5-mile facility again until all the walls are covered in the energy-absorbent polystyrene foam. Track officials have issued promises to review the situation and make changes where necessary. And Wednesday, far from the din and recriminations, the data from the crash recorder within Gordon's No. 24 car will land on the desk of the man most qualified to make those decisions. Then the evaluation process will truly begin.
Dean Sicking, director of the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, helped to develop the SAFER barrier, which has become -- along with Bob Hubbard and Jim Downing's Head and Neck Support (HANS) device -- one of the most important life-saving tools in modern auto racing. It went up at all NASCAR tracks in 2004, on the heels of a spate of fatalities and debilitating injuries in the sport's national divisions. It's done its job masterfully, allowing driver upon driver to walk away from terrible accidents that in the past might have also come with a tremendous human cost.
But, as Gordon's spinning, right-front hit on Sunday clearly illustrated, not every wall at every speedway is SAFER than it could be. Four years ago, in the scramble to add soft walls to every track, Sicking's team gave each facility a preliminary evaluation. They looked at historical records, found the points on each racetrack where the hardest impacts had occurred over the past five to seven years, and covered them with the barrier. The walls left bare were those in areas that, according to the historical data, offered the lowest probability of big hits.
But a racecar traveling in excess of 150 mph can do strange things. It can hit things it's not supposed to hit. Just ask Jeff Fuller, who two years ago hammered a bare stretch of inside wall during a then-Busch race at Kentucky Speedway in almost the same manner Gordon did at Las Vegas on Sunday, crashing into an opening that made the impact worse than it should have been. He suffered a broken finger and a broken wrist. "There should be something done to make that safer," he said at the time.
Taking his side
Jeff Gordon voiced his displeasure that Las Vegas Motor Speeedway did not have SAFER barriers on its inside walls, and others agreed.
Now, maybe, there will be. It's not uncommon, Sicking said, for a problem area in one track to spur changes in other facilities of similar type and design. "That has happened, yes," he said Tuesday by cell phone. "Similar tracks behave very similarly. Let's say we stopped the barrier a couple of hundred feet short. Then we could go back and look at extending all comparable tracks."
So it's very conceivable that Gordon's crash at Las Vegas, and the outcry afterward, could lead to protected inside backstretch walls -- and, hopefully, reconfigured infield access points -- at all 1.5-mile tri-ovals, which are the meat and potatoes of the Sprint Cup schedule. The impact of Gordon's accident may eventually be felt not just in Las Vegas, but in Atlanta, Texas, Kansas and other points far beyond.
It all comes down to the data. Steve Peterson, NASCAR's technical director and resident safety expert, presented the crash data from Gordon's car to a colleague of Sicking's on Tuesday, who was expected to relay it to the MWRSF director Wednesday. Those numbers will give the scientists in Nebraska an accurate picture of the accident's severity, which sometimes can be very different from what the driver feels. "If it's significant enough to lead us to believe there's a high risk of reduced safety or fatality," Sicking said, "we'll recommend full barrier."
When NASCAR detects a hard hit on an uncovered part of a racetrack, Sicking said, the crash data is sent to Nebraska where MWRSF engineers search for a reasonable alternative. Sometimes it's reconfiguring an area -- like a wall opening -- sometimes it's extending the barrier, and sometimes it's both. And if a change is necessary at one type of track, it's often necessary at all tracks of that same shape and dimension.
"Similar tracks should get similar treatment, we believe," Sicking said, "unless we identify something unique about Vegas. We'll go through all the drawings and photos to make sure there's not something unique about it. If there was something unique that caused this crash that's not present at its sister tracks around the nation, then we would just recommend it for Vegas. But that is the exception rather than the rule."
And hopefully it's a step toward complete coverage at all racetracks, the only way to prevent the heartbreaking possibility of a driver being injured -- or worse -- in a collision with an unprotected wall when the technology existed to prevent it. Toward that end, the impact of Gordon's crash may be much bigger than it appeared on Sunday. He just might have taken one for the entire garage.
