Competitors learn of safety updates in annual meeting
By Bob Pockrass
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Drivers and crew chiefs learned more about helmet certification and got a refresher course on seats and on other safety topics during their annual safety meeting Tuesday morning.
The 45-minute meeting is held to give competitors an update on safety issues. NASCAR conducts one during each test session at Daytona International Speedway.
"We talked a lot about the fit of helmets, how they're supposed to fit for the most protection," Roush Fenway Racing driver Carl Edwards said. "Also about the head rest heights. They showed us some videos of Ricky Rudd's injury that he sustained last year [at California Speedway] and maybe how we could build our head rests to be better and things like that, so it was definitely very informative.
"We also talked about, I think they call it hats off. Maybe that's a new name now, but the inflatable thing they put inside the helmet, so that if you have a possible neck injury, the EMTs can come up and blow that up - unhook your helmet and raise the helmet off your head without putting any stress on your neck. I talked to my guys at Bell, and they're going to put those in all my helmets, so that's going to be pretty neat."
Rudd suffered a separated shoulder at California last year and missed five races.
"They've got rigid seats now with the shoulder and head support, and you want to make sure that there's nothing in the seat that might cause you to maybe hurt your shoulder," GM Racing Safety Manager Tom Gideon said Tuesday. "There can be edges of the seat or something that could get into your shoulder. We think that might have happened in Ricky's case."
Gideon said he hopes that with the increased scrutiny on seats that NASCAR will eventually set a standard for seats as it does for helmets and head-and-neck restraints.
"We did talk about the future of seats," Gideon said. "The seats are very good today in these cars, but they could use a standard. That's something that is being worked on, to come up with a standard."
In addition to seeing the Rudd crash, the drivers also looked at the Brad Keselowski crash, where he got up on his side on the California Speedway wall during a Busch Series race. Once cars get airborne is when the unpredictable often begins.
"We talked about tumbles and cars leaving the ground - that's not something you want to have happen because then the weird stuff starts to happen," Gideon said. "You don't want to have strange things happening."
NASCAR has collected 5,000 pieces of data since the introduction of black boxes in cars in 2002 to record crashes, Gideon said.
"Knowing how hard people hit, they still don't have anything from the body," Gideon said. "Knowing how hard cars hit when there's a transfer function to what happens with the body. Dale Earnhardt didn't hit very hard, but the outcome was pretty severe.
"That's because he moved, and we know that you can't move. That's one of the problems. There are things down the road that may help us learn these things - there are ear-plug accelerometers that are being used now in IRL. They are not perfected, but they're out there. What we're looking for is non-intrusive devices to tell us what's going on with the driver."
- Mentioned Drivers:
- Carl Edwards
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