Scorching conditions push drivers to the limits of endurance
By Mike Hembree - Associate Editor
Thursday, June 12, 2008
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Long ago, in an ancient time when NASCAR drivers didn’t have motorhomes and personal shower facilities at virtually every track, the pain associated with long automobile races on hot and humid days was very clear in the drivers’ “lounge” after the race.
Many drivers staggered into the room looking like they had been on forced marches for days through an equatorial jungle. Their uniforms were sweaty, dirty, soaked garments that probably should have been burned on the spot. The drivers were panting for breath and yearning for liquids, and oxygen tanks were considered blessings.
Richard Petty was among the drivers slammed by such conditions. His body, having absorbed the hard knocks of numerous broken bones and surgery that removed much of his damaged stomach, threatened to give up at some of those super-hot races, and he often looked like a dead man walking at the end of some of those days late in his career.
On Sunday, hours before the field took the green flag in what promised to be – and was – a scorcher of a race on one of Pocono Raceway’s hottest race days ever, Petty remembered a day at Dover International Speedway in the 1970s that resulted in drivers playing a weary sort of heat roulette.
“It was so hot and so tough that day that drivers were getting out of the cars right and left,” Petty said. “You could just run a little while and it would be miserable. They’d have to get you out and put another driver in. I think just about everybody changed. They’d pull a guy out and stick somebody else in the car, hose that guy down and put him in another car.”
It got so crazy, Petty said, that drivers who had escaped the heat of their own cars wound up relief-driving later in the race for someone else and were actually competing with their normal intensity and effort against their own teams. “It was strange, but, man, it was hot,” he said.
Things didn’t get quite that goofy at Pocono during the Pocono 500, but some drivers almost certainly were very tempted to leap out of their cars during a pit stop and run for any spot even remotely cooler than the hellish cockpits. The heat was oppressive, and virtually everybody other than race winner Kasey Kahne and the most fanatic among the assembled fans was wishing the race had been shortened from its too-long 500-mile length.
After the race, second-place finisher Brian Vickers, fresh from giving Red Bull Racing its best finish ever, looked like he had been stamped repeatedly by a dry-cleaning machine. Denny Hamlin, who rolled home third, wasn’t ready to walk a fashion runway, either. Dale Earnhardt Jr., in fourth, appeared to be at the point of exhaustion.
And those were the guys who did well.
Kahne explained that he felt OK after the race. But most winners do. He said he used extra cooling hoses on his upper body to combat the heat.
The heat issue was compounded by the new car, which is packed with more protective thingamajigs that tend to make life in a small, enclosed space on a hot and humid day even more miserable.
“We want to keep the cars light and go fast, but we’re killing ourselves,” Vickers said. “We’re going to the infield care center after the races, and that’s ridiculous. NASCAR needs to step in and say we have to do something to cool these cars down and help us. It is extremely freaking hot out there.”
Hamlin said the current race car is “way hotter than the old car. The ventilation is not near as good. … This is the longest race I’ve ever been a part of. It just seemed like it took forever. … It doesn’t hit you until you get vertical [leaving the car after the race]. It just seems like all the blood comes from your head and goes somewhere else.”
That somewhere else wasn’t a pool that formed at their feet. But none of them would have been surprised.
It was that hot.
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