Simmering Safety Issues in NASCAR

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Simmering Safety Issues in NASCAR

Friday, April 11th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

Safety has always been an important issue in NASCAR, but only recently has it become a real focus of not only drivers, but also of NASCAR as an entity itself and an issue for the fans as well. When NASCAR started out, regular cars didn’t have seat belts, so of course their race cars counterparts also did not have seatbelts, although sometimes drivers would use harnesses that were normally used for air travel in their race cars. Of course, cars in the 1950s just did not go anywhere near as fast as they do now. That being said, there have been crashes and accidents in NASCAR since its inception, and in addition, varying degrees of caution have been present during the entire time.

Where modern NASCAR is concerned, safety has become the primary concern of NASCAR officials. Officials are concerned for racers’ safety while they rocket around the track, but they’re also forced to look out for the safety of their fans that trip and fall in the stadium bleachers. In the modern world it’s always somebody’s fault whenever an accident occurs. For this reason NASCAR has been forced to pay closer and closer attention to safety of everyone around a NASCAR race. If they were to ignore the increasing needs the public has for safety and security, they would be liable for all manner of accusations and, in today’s world, lawsuits.

Recent crashes in NASCAR have prompted excessive safety measures to be suggested. Most notable are the crashes of Earnhardt Sr., the second of which was fatal. NASCAR fans know that there’s a risk that comes with high-speed auto racing, but they still can’t stand to see one of their favorite drivers killed in a crash. It’s always been a small part of NASCAR, and perhaps it’s one of the reasons that the sport did not become immensely popular until recently. It’s possible that previous generations just could not get into a sport in which the stars were dying on the track. For this reason, fans turned to basketball and baseball. However, in the last few decades, fans have flooded NASCAR with a burgeoning fan base, and this fan base has been appropriately saddened and sobered by deaths such as that of Dale Earnhardt. In many ways, it’s the demand of the fan base that is pushing current safety reforms into fruition.

Some of the new safety regulations concern the car’s infrastructure, specifically the area immediately surrounding the driver. Of course, the goal is to avoid high-impact to the driver in a high-impact crash. At speeds like those seen every day in NASCAR, this is, of course, no easy task. Certain bar constructions help to increase stability of this box in which the driver is sitting, such that the roof will not collapse so easily and the steering wheel and module will not force themselves into the driver. All of these initiatives are admirable ones, and unfortunately, none of them are so easy to implement. If such things were easily done, all modern automobiles would be now sporting the same features.

In addition to some safety concerns within the car, NASCAR is looking into the construction of walls surrounding each race track in hopes of finding a way to effectively reduce high impact crashes into these structures. You can imagine that concrete walls are none too kind to mere cars crashing into them at speeds approaching 200 mph. Also concerning the area of the race track are security measures indicated for the safety of NASCAR fans and anyone else entering the stadium to work or anything else. In modern times, it’s always necessary to ensure security, especially at events where thousands and thousands of fans and others are coming together in one spot. Such security issues have never been a bigger issue than they are today.

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