Safety in Racing

by Tammy

Racecar driver Jason Leffler died last Wednesday in a sprint car accident on a dirt track. There's speculation that something broke on the car, which is what propelled him into the wall, and we know that he hit the wall hard twice. He died from blunt force trauma to the neck (that's basically hitting something, not simply damage from deceleration forces), and I saw one suggestion that the first impact damaged the integrity of the car's cage, which allowed Leffler to be hurt in the second impact, or in both.

What I'm finding interesting, however, is the more subdued response to his death compared to Dan Wheldon's, for instance. After Wheldon's—which was in a much more public forum and happened to (let's be honest) a much more famous driver—there were tribute laps and weeks of discussion about how to make cars and tracks more safe. The response to Leffler's death seems to be less dramatic.

I suppose there are more reasons for that, specifically that dirt track racing is what it is, and will never be as regulated as the big-money series like IndyCar or NASCAR. I'm not saying no one cares, far from it. But the general consensus is that racecar drivers simply can't escape physics. Which is true enough.

Drivers, series, and tracks do their best to minimize the forces transferred to the driver's body in the event of a crash. The HANS (head and neck system, shown above), SAFER (steel and foam energy reduction, shown below) barriers, and the Car of Tomorrow were all mandated or instituted after Dale Earnhardt's death in 2001, in which he impacted the wall at -68 to -48 Gs. The CoT and SAFER barriers do a lot to absorb some of that force—as do tire barriers—but they can't do everything. (The HANS helps keep your neck where it should be and transfers force to the rest of your body.)

Leffler was wearing a HANS. So was Wheldon. But they weren't driving a CoT (those are in NASCAR). SAFER barriers didn't do Wheldon any good, because he flew above them (the ability to launch has been greatly reduced with the new IndyCar chassis, ugly though it may be). Leffler's local dirt track didn't have SAFER barriers, nor is it likely to put them in. Because that's not what dirt track racing is about.

Again, there's only so much you can do to outwit physics. Racing's history is littered with lives lost, famous and not-so-famous ones. I suppose it's only in the modern day that we have the luxury of being shocked when one of our current stars dies, because it's become so rare. Lucky us.

But every once in a while, we're reminded that there's really nothing about racing that's safe.

Oh, The Emotion

by Tammy

Saturday was a particularly interesting day around racing for the emotion stirred up in a bunch of directions.

First, I felt shock and concern hearing about and then watching the violent accident Tim Bergmeister had at Fuji Speedway in a Porsche he was sharing with his brother Joerg (who I know slightly). He basically smacked a metal guardrail with the driver's door of his car at very, very high speed (link here if you want to see it, I'm not going to embed the video). The impact tore the door off the car, leaving the viewer able to see the driver with legs and arms at rest, not on pedals or the wheel. Tim is apparently all right, though there's some concern over the state of one lobe of his lung (fractured rib punctures, I believe).

Then the racing world held its breath watching Eric McClure go hard into the inside wall at Talladega. I can't be the only person who had flashbacks to Las Vegas in October. In this instance, the first scary moment was not seeing his window net come down. Then there were the swarms of workers around the car, and the cutting of the windscreen and peeling back of the roof. Finally the careful extraction of the driver onto a back-board and the rushing him to the life-flight helicopter.

McClure seems to be fine. There's been no real word on injuries, but there's been plenty of assurance the he was alert and talking to workers at every step along the way.

The universal reaction after the sigh of relief upon learning he'd be OK, was to say "thank goodness for HANS devices (above), SAFER barriers (at right, at Daytona), the Car of Tomorrow (NASCAR's redesign in part for safety), and big, protective seats." Agreed. I couldn't help but think that back in Dale Earnhardt's day, this crash would have killed McClure. Or Earnhardt's crash today wouldn't have killed him.

Then there was the melodrama and the petty feuds. In the heat of the last lap (the second two-lap-shootout to try to end the race, after the first one ended with McClure's crash and a lengthy red flag), Hornish pushed Danica into the wall (because of a tire going flat, apparently) and she retaliated by nudging him into the wall after the checkers.

Much was made in the Twitterverse of what a diva she is, that this is why people hate her. Many questions were asked about why she wasn't called to the NASCAR hauler and put on probation like Kyle Busch was for intentionally wrecking someone under yellow last year. (Beaux Barfield, IndyCar director of competition, made a good point in a Tweet: partly the decision whether to penalize or even reprimand is based on a pattern of behavior, or history; to extrapolate further, Danica doesn't have a track record for that, KyBu does.)

There was a lot of emotion swirling around about both events in the Nationwide race, with some people on Twitter making borderline offensive statements, others taking offense, still others defending, and on and on and on. Somewhere in that feed, I saw a quoted tweet in which someone had said to Ryan Truex, a driver in the race, "I hope you get hurt." Fortunately, this was making the rounds with "wtf?" kinds of comments and chastisement. (I'm still not sure why that was directed at Ryan Truex, unless he started one of the accidents?)

Now, I know this stuff happens. Sterling Marlin got death threats after starting the slide that sent Dale Earnhardt into the wall to his death. I'm writing a bit about similar passionate fan reaction in my second manuscript. But honestly ... I didn't expect to actually see it pop up in Twitter! When I write scenarios in my fiction, I figure I'm starting with real events and exaggerating them a WHOLE LOT.

But then, they say, truth is always stranger than fiction.

What did you all think about the accidents, reactions, and emotions this weekend?