The first track (corporation) owner to initiate improved safety ‘fence’ measures wins the coverted award for thinking out of the box.

And is due all the positive spin publicity which place the onus on other tracks to follow their lead.

Now, back to sleep until the next incident ?

“The big one” hasn’t actually happened yet. Eventually fans are going to get killed in one of these big wrecks. After the lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and all of the other blowback, NASCAR is going to wish they did more to stop crashes like these from happening.

I want to put this right up front here: I am not going to bang away at NASCAR, Daytona or any of the tracks for the design of the fences. To my mind, the existing fences do an admirable job of keeping dangerous stuff away from the crowd while still doing their secondary task: letting people see the action. A lot of folks have said that racetracks should have a hockey rink-style “plexiglass” barrier to keep parts, wheels, cars and the like out of the grandstands. I’m here to tell you that it’s possible that such a thing could be developed one day, but it will be at an insane cost. After all, a 1500 lb. racecar traveling 200 MPH carries 12,000 times the kinetic energy that a half pound hockey puck traveling 100 MPH (3,000 times the weight and the speed factor is actually times 4, because speed is squared in the equation). So, the plexiglass would have to be 12,000 times as strong (and you can double all this again for the stock car scenario, since the cars are more than twice as heavy) while still being largely transparent, and I haven’t even touched the fact that broken racecars have jagged bits that would create stress risers in the plexiglass, and on and on, and shut up, nerdboy, is what you’re all saying. Anyway, the fences are what we’ve got now and what we’re probably going to have for the foreseeable future. Secondary fences, moving the seats back…those are also potential solutions, but also carry huge costs (adding a second fence behind the existing one, plus probably ripping out seats to make room for the second fence) and reduced revenues to the tracks (getting rid of the first few rows of seats decreases the number of tickets sold). That’s a tough sell, even with what’s at stake here.

OK, if we’re years away from having better accident containment, where does that leave us? Are we good enough where we sit right now? Saturday’s accident, like the half dozen restrictor plate accidents that I can think of in the course of the last 3-4 years where we had a car get into the fence, those all tell me that it’s not a matter of “if” we’ll see an accident where we have multiple cars get airborne in the same accident, it’s a matter of “when”. Roof flaps do a great job of keeping a singular spinning stock car on the ground by vastly reducing the resulting lift, but once that spinning car is hit by another car (increasing the speed of the spinning car, which increases the chance of takeoff, while the front bumper of the impacting car likely exerts an upward force to the spinning car), the spinning car is likely to take off. That’s what we see at plate tracks all the time during the “Big One(s)”. Were we ever to get two cars airborne (not unlikely, since the apparent current trend during plate wrecks is to bury the throttle and try to push through) and then they both converge on roughly the same point of the fence…that makes me shudder to think about. The first car would knock down the fence (see Carl Edwards’ 2009 wreck at Talladega or Kyle Larson’s wreck on Saturday) and the second car would sail right through the hole. Had this happened on Saturday, what would we be talking about today?

Racing is dangerous. Nobody is going to dispute that. It’s a matter of reducing the amount of risk that the sport (yes, the sport as a whole) is exposed to. What can be done? Can something be done for cheaper than all-new fencing systems? For starts, NASCAR has been wildly negligent about their attitude about blocking over the years, at plate tracks, especially (I first opined about this fully six years ago in my old blog, followed again two years later after the Edwards wreck at Talladega). Blocking is not just tolerated, it’s borderline encouraged under the guise of “have at it, boys!” Anything goes out there. A guy pulls a bump and run on you? You’re gonna be called a Nancy Boy, unless you strike back! Stuff a guy into the fence because he got his front bumper even with your rear wheel? Do it! Weaving down the straights and through the tri-oval to make your car 20 feet wide? Sure! Cutting up or down on a guy, even though he’s totally alongside you? Absolutely! Never mind about the crazy risks this introduces, or about the fact that these actions reduce passing and ruin the racing (compelling reasons to crack down on blocking in and of themselves)! You’ve got a position to protect! Screw everybody else (including the fans)! Meanwhile, NASCAR has led everybody to believe that they’re entitled to a wheel-to-wheel finish in every race by the introduction of the Green-White-Checkered finish, which bunches the field up with a few laps to go far more often than would organically happen during a season, while encouraging people to pull crazy stuff in the middle of huge, dense packs of cars. Throw all of this stuff into a blender, and you get an insane amount of risk. Every car arriving on the scene of a spinning car or an accident at near-racing speed represents a spike in risk. It is on every sanctioning body to review and reduce that risk.

Going back to my earlier scenario, what does happen if we get two airborne cars in the same section of fence? There is no question about it: a bunch of dead spectators. With a dozen or more aggrieved families, do we really think that a group of talented prosecutors won’t step in and try to liberate a sum from NASCAR and the tracks in upwards of 9-figures? They will, after all, be able to claim that: 1. NASCAR, the tracks and all racing sanctioning bodies are understating the risks by just putting a blurb on the back of the tickets, when they could/should be making everybody through the gates sign a waiver, which still may or may not hold up to a jury trial of this magnitude, and 2. NASCAR can’t claim they couldn’t foresee such a thing, due to their long, sordid history of plate track wrecks. And if such a wreck causes an already automobile-averse member of Congress to decide that racing is not just a waste of money and natural resources, but also poses a threat to public health, who is to say that we won’t wind up with some grand dog-and-pony show hearing where the entire sport (NASCAR, IndyCar, sports cars, NHRA, local short tracks) is put in jeopardy? What then? Was just saying “well, racing is dangerous” while not bothering to reduce all reasonable sources of risk to a more acceptable level worth it?

It would seem that NASCAR is in a bit of a catch 22 with Daytona and Talladega. Improving safety at these tracks may require a combination of improved fencing, reduced speeds, breaking up the pack, and perhaps even reducing banking.

There are always instances and examples cited where a certain amount of data and or ‘kill/injury rate’ must be accumulated FIRST before any powers to be decide to take remedial action which justifies THEIR spending of THEIR money …… to cite but a few examples …… stop signs, traffic lights ….. Examples we have all witnessed slowly and sometimes not being implemented ……

And the clock keeps ticking seemingly without remedial action being taken while the injuries, long term suffering from those injuries and deaths (as well as the suffering of family members and relatives who have had relatives injured or die) must accumulate in order to justify money being spent…..

$$$$$$ appears to be the factor…. Though ‘officials’ may publicly state otherwise.

Is it less expensive to continue with the status quo and with the tried and true propaganda received from ‘officials’ ?

Is it less expensive to endure the cost of impending lawsuits and the resultant negative publicity?

Is it less costly to be innovative and implement the iniatives that technology has to offer ……. And be in the forefront of ‘safety’?

Many if not most plate races “feature” at least one “big one” in which a car goes airborne. Again, I’m not going out on a limb by asserting that it was well established that a car will likely to go airborne in a cluster event, and airborne cars headed into the fence will hit poles and/or shred fences and send debris into the crowd. There’s thus a low but finite risk that this will happen at any event. The questions are whether or not NASCAR and the fans think that risk remains acceptable–and whether changes to reduce that risk would diminish the entertainment value unacceptably.

But auto racing is a dangerous sport, always has been, always will be. Accidents will never be completely avoidable. And no one should be lulled into thinking that wrecking is just a part of the entertainment.