Talladega certainly added a new level of excitement to the 2009 Sprint Cup season, eh?
But was it the type of excitement that should be acceptable in this age of improved safety? I spent a good part of Monday reading differing opinions from across the country, and I’m not surprised that experts and fans were divided in their thoughts.
On one side you have the folks who believe something has to be done now to avoid a tragedy. Carl Edwards, moments after going upside down and slamming into the catch fence, said to a national TV audience that if things stayed as they are at the restrictor-plate tracks, someone was going to get killed.
On the other side you have those who, like rookie race winner Brad Keselowski, say racing is an inherently dangerous sport and cutting speeds or reducing banking at Talladega and Daytona wouldn’t be in its best interest.
“There has to be some element of danger into it,” Keselowski said after his dramatic win. “No different than a football player. Who doesn’t love watching football players hit each other head on as fast as they can? I think that’s how John Madden made his career, saying, ‘Boom!’ That’s what the fans want. They want contact.
“If we would have run all race without a single lap of contact, everyone in the media center would have wrote about how boring of a race it was, and instead we ran one of the best races you could ever watch on TV with full contact the whole time.”
Both sides have legitimate arguments. No one wants to see drivers or fans get killed or seriously injured just to sell tickets and get high TV ratings. NASCAR, in fact, built its new car from the ground up to prevent just that, and last Sunday was proof that it works.
What happened with Edwards’ car was a fluke. As NASCAR’s Robin Pemberton pointed out in a news conference Monday, the car was beginning to settle back onto the track when it was lifted airborne again by the car of Ryan Newman. Without Newman’s car pingponging it upward, the 99 would have landed — as it was designed to do — back on the track without coming close to the catch fence.
That it did get hit twice and slam violently into the fence with only minor injuries to a handful of fans (and with Edwards being able to climb out and jog to the finish line) attests to what NASCAR has built. Also, and it may have escaped the limelight because of what happened later, Robby Gordon walked away from what was an extremely brutal head-on hit into the infield wall.
So, clearly, the cars are built to handle such massive hits. But for the sake of argument, what would have happened if Edwards’ car had gotten hit in just the right manner as to send it pole vaulting over the fence and into the crowd? The odds are greatly against it happening, but from what we saw Sunday, it could — and if it did, the sport would never be the same again.
It was with that in mind that Pemberton, who heads research and development, Sprint Cup Series director John Darby and NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter convened Monday with the media.
“We will take whatever measures we need to in order to ensure the races are as safe as possible for the drivers and the spectators,” Hunter said. “We will make it as safe as we humanly can.”
But what can be done? Plate racing has been the thorn in NASCAR’s side since Bill Elliott went 215 mph on a lap at Talladega. Through the years, nearly everything short of putting a lawnmower engine in the cars has been tried. The result has been either races that were so boring they were unacceptable, or the current style of racing where large packs of cars are basically stuck together.
The close racing is appealing to fans, but drivers despise it, and for good reason. With such a narrow window for mistakes, the odds of huge wrecks breaking out are great. Drivers feel the plate races are more about making split-second decisions than about handling or horsepower. A good race should involve all three.
“We slowed them down and did all of these things with the plates and roof flaps and stuff like that to keep cars on the ground and keep them under a certain speed that we felt was the right speed to keep cars from getting airborne,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. “Now we are pack racing so badly that it’s just about all you can do to not be wrecked or get in a wreck.”
One suggestion this week was to reconfigure Talladega and Daytona and take the banking out. As Darby pointed out, such a move would reduce speeds, but the resulting races would be less than desirable.
“Flattening the racetrack, sure, that would put us in a situation where you could run without restrictor plates, but I don’t see that as a real viable option,” Darby said. “You could make that statement or make that suggestion at every racetrack that we race at. If we flattened Lowe’s Motor Speedway and reduced the speeds to 70 miles an hour, sure, you could make an argument it would be a safer racetrack.
“But at the same time, we are in the racing business, and a lot of what the sport surrounds is professional drivers controlling cars at high speeds.”
NASCAR has to walk a fine line between entertainment and safety. It’s easy to say the cars need to be separated at the big tracks, but how? Until a better way is discovered, my guess is the plates — and the packs — aren’t going anywhere.
Lindsey Young is a sports writer at the Chattanooga Times Free Press who started work at the Chattanooga News-Free Press 24 years ago. He covers the Northwest Georgia prep beat and NASCAR. Lindsey’s hometown is Ringgold, Ga., and he graduated from Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School. He received an associate’s degree from Dalton Junior College (now Dalton State) and a bachelor’s degree in communications from UTC. He has won several writing awards, including two Tennessee Sports ...
No, the last Sunday Talladega event with the 99 car is not a fluke, or freak accident, but rather it is well within the envelope of expected outcome for a wreck at either Daytona or Talladega. A Cup car has about 700 to 800 lbs of aero drag when it is pointed in the right direction; when the car gets airborne and rotated a bit the aero drag can increase to more than 4000 lbs, in other words the airborne car is slowing (decelerating) much faster than a car can with its brakes and all four tires on the ground. Moreover, the airborne car can stay aloft for as long as 1 to 3 seconds, again depending on the specifics of the crash event. If the field of cars is traveling at 190 mph or something like that then with a 3 second flight any car that is within 300 yards of the crash event has time to get to the airborne car and punt it. We've been doing engineering analysis calculations and CFD simulations and the Carl Edwards crash is anything but a fluke; from a scientific viewpoint, the fluke is that the 99 car didn't go into the grandstands. If the 39 had hit the 99 just two feet or so closer to the center of the 99, calculations suggest that the 99 would have cleared the catch fence. As a race car driver AND an engineer I love the thrill of the sport, the challenge of the calculations, and the drama of the race. However, I want ALL of the spectators to go home happy, and not in a pine box.
darby is a fool with his "logic". To talk about going from 200 mph to 70 is a stupid illistration, but "fans" take it as gospel.They just need to lower the banking on one end of the tracks to lower speeds to 170's-180's, that would make it work but that would cost nascar/ISC/France family (their all synonymous) a few million per track. we can't have that when now it is just the owners spending the millions with destroyed cars.
Another possibility was what if those four cars had not been so far ahead of the field. How many others would have been collected? In this scenario, what is the possiblity of debris going through windshields?
Finally, for the media to even ask, much less print what Keselowski says or thinks is beyond bizarre. Someone trying to earn a place in cup with limited experience is going to say nascar is wrong? yeah right.
Prof pi if even half of your "facts and equations" are correct that is scarey to me not exciting or fun. thanks
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