Soft walls have saved lives, and Indy’s Tony George was the trigger
Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Tony George is the man who made soft walls happen (Photo: Jerry Markland/Getty Images for NASCAR)
By Mike Mulhern
INDIANAPOLIS
Safety these days is just taken for granted in NASCAR, with all the improvements made in the sport since Dale Earnhardt’s death in 2001.
But two things – the unexpected death of NASCAR safety guru Steve Peterson last week, and the sport’s arrival this week at Indianapolis Motor Speedway – offer a moment of reminder of just how much things have changed.
Just check out all the hard NASCAR crashes the past several years, and you’ll see something quite remarkable: Since Earnhardt’s death no driver has been killed in any of NASCAR’s three national touring series.
And one big reason for that success story – soft walls.
Now they’ve been racing here at Indy since 1909, and a lot of wild and crazy things have happened over the years, a lot of dramatic, horrific crashes, and too many deaths. So it’s fitting that Indianapolis Motor Speedway was the birthplace of one of racing’s most amazing safety achievements—soft walls.
Simply put, soft walls are a revolutionary concept, in a sport where not so long ago – and even at some major tracks still today – steel guard rail ruled.
Soft walls: a radical concept that even works at 200mph Daytona, where here track safety crew work after a crash (Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Soft walls: the SAFER barrier has saved lives (Graphic: NASCAR)
The leap to soft walls by Indy president Tony George and Indy Racing League officials 10 years ago—to install the then-novel three-foot-thick steel-and-Styrofoam safety barriers on a test-section of the inside walls—triggered a revolution in racing safety that has kept many a NASCAR driver from death or serious injury.
Now every NASCAR track, except the two road courses, is surrounded by soft walls – which can diminish G-force impact in a crash by as much as 40 percent.
At first there was some reluctance to George’s move, some disbelief that something seemingly so simple – a sandwich of Styrofoam – could work, much less work so well as it has.
Leo Mehl, the Goodyear racing boss for so many years and director of the IRL from 1996 through 1999, has seen more than his share of deaths and disasters in this sport around the world.
“The theory of soft walls had been around since I could remember,” Mehl says. “I can remember lots of attempts to put foam on walls.
“Smokey Yunick designed a track so the walls would give—the whole thing would move back.”
But nothing quite worked. Until now.
Well, sometimes the soft walls need a bit of repair after a crash, like here at California (Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)
“My personal opinion was it’s better to try something than not take the risk at all,” Mehl said. “Somebody has to start this process.
“The bottom line is when you do anything different in racing, you take a great big risk of making the situation worse. Tony George took a big risk to let us put that wall in.”
Engineers at Wayne State did the studies and discovered the system could reduce the deadly energy ‘spike’ by 30 to 40 Gs. It is that spike that typically kills.
One of the big surprises – the system works so well that it is very rare for any repairs to be needed during a race.
The new soft walls here got their first major test not during the Indy 500 but in the 1998 IROC event: Arie Luyendyk got caught up in a crash and hit the wall hard, virtually shredding the soft wall barrier.
“I was with Tony watching the race, and he hit at a terrible angle—an angle that often results in injury,” Mehl said.
But Luyendyk escaped serious injury. And A. J. Foyt was very impressed, saying Luyendyk was lucky to be alive.
Arie Luyendyk tests Tony George’s new life-saving ‘soft walls,’ in the 1998 IROC (Photo: Indianapolis Motor Speedway)
“We knew the barrier had taken at least 30 or 40 Gs off the hit,” Mehl says. “But as we cleaned up the debris it became obvious we needed to get some more help. And the most experienced guys we knew in the business for guardrails, attenuators and such, were at the University of Nebraska.”
At that point Nebraska’s Dr. Dean Sicking became involved, and the soft wall barrier was improved. NASCAR officials quickly signed on to the program, and crash-testing began in earnest in 2000. By May 2002 George was willing to make the full move to soft walls all the way around this track – with what is now called the SAFER barrier.
“I spent most of my professional life in racing tires —so understand I’m not a safety expert —but I can’t image any other safety feature that made so much difference,” Mehl says.
“Racing will never be completely safe, but it’s safer now than it ever has been in my lifetime.”
Leo Mehl, once Goodyear’s star racing boss, then IRL president, helped lead the charge for soft walls (Photo: Indianapolis Motor Speedway)
When Kyle Busch gets on this track this week, he’ll be looking to pad his amazing points lead in the Sprint Cup standings and perhaps add another win to his league-leading column.
It has been, flatly, a Toyota season. Toyota drivers have led a total of 2,429 of the 5,692 laps in this season’s 19 Cup events. That’s nearly 50 percent.
And Busch himself has led more than 1,000 of them.
Toyota’s turnaround since 2007 has been amazing. And Tony Stewart, Busch’s teammate, deserves a lot of credit…though he’s still winless on the Cup tour.
Stewart, who grew up just 50 miles from this track, calls Indy “my home race.”
That’s both the 500 and the 400. He’s not yet won the 500, though he came close; but he’s going for a third 400 win this week.
“A race at the Brickyard is more than just a regular points race,” Stewart says. “It’s always been a big race to all the Cup drivers, but then when you grow up in Indiana it just makes it that much more important.
“I first came with my father when I was probably five years old. We were in some bus that had a luggage rack in the top of it.
“You had to get up at 0-Dark-30 to get on the bus to ride up to Indianapolis for race day. They threw me up in the luggage rack. Somebody gave me a pillow, and everybody started throwing their jackets on top of me to keep me warm.
“We sat in turns three and four, two rows up, right in the middle of the short chute. The hard thing was you could hardly see anything. The cars were so fast, they were a blur.
“But to see those cars under caution, and smell the methanol fumes, it was pretty cool.”
Fans may sometimes take soft walls for granted...but these drivers never do. Here Brian Vickers (83) and David Gilliland give Charlotte’s soft walls a workout (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
THE NASCAR NOTEBOOK
NASCAR Wednesday slapped Toyota with a slight engine rules change on the Nationwide tour that should slow Toyota teams a bit.
Toyota has dominated the Nationwide series this season, and rival car makers have been claiming Toyota engines make more power. So NASCAR took several engines from Nationwide cars after the Chicago race two weeks ago for dyno testing.
And this new rule is apparently the result.
The rules bulletin:
“At all Events, unless otherwise specified, all engines with a cylinder bore spacing less than 4.470 inches must compete using a tapered spacer with four (4) 1.125-inch diameter holes. At all Events, unless otherwise specified, all engines with a cylinder bore spacing of 4.470 inches or more must compete using a tapered spacer with four (4) 1.100-inch diameter holes. Unless otherwise authorized, the carburetor restrictor will be issued by NASCAR.”
On the Nationwide tour only Toyota has an engine with the larger bore spacing; so that engine will now be choked down a little.
The new Chevrolet R07 engine, which is not currently legal on the Nationwide tour though it is the standard engine on the Cup side, would be subject to the new rule if NASCAR were to allow Nationwide teams to run it. Presently GM teams are running the 10-year-old SB2 Chevrolet engine in the Nationwide series.
“Eventually all teams that upgrade to new engine packages will be subject to this rule modification,” Robin Pemberton, NASCAR vice president of competition, says.
Some engine men say they’re now awaiting results of NASCAR’s dyno testing of Truck engines taken after last weekend’s Kentucky race, and they say they wouldn’t be surprised if NASCAR doesn’t expand that rule to the Truck tour too.
If Tony Stewart or any other drivers complain about Goodyear’s selection of tires for the fall Atlanta race, they can blame Kyle Busch, Travis Kvapil and Scott Riggs for the selection – those three just finished a Goodyear tire test there. Busch was the spring winner.
“The way the surface is, it’s always pretty hard to find a tire that will cooperate with it,” Busch says. “The tire was just too hard here in the spring, and we didn’t even really wear on the tire at all.
“With the softer compounds Goodyear has been trying, we’ve been able to get a little better grip. We’ve been getting a better feel out of the car.”
Busch tested at 180.662 mph; Riggs at 180.994 mph.
“Goodyear brought a lot of different tires and compounds, and we all pretty much found one tire we liked,” Riggs said. “It was really manageable, consistent and predictable on a long run. It was something you could actually drive and manipulate, to make the car get around the race track.
“We all seemed to be in agreement that there was at least one tire we were all happy with.”
“There is definitely going to be a big difference in the fall race compared to the spring,” Kvapil said. “When we were here in March, the cars were really loose in the corner, and we felt like we were sliding around.
“Since then, we’ve learned a lot about the new car. And Goodyear has come back with three of four different combinations to try to give us a better feel for the car, better grip and a tire that’s still going to last.”
Kyle Busch won’t be focusing on just Sunday’s 400. He’s running in all three NASCAR events in town this week, including the Nationwide race and Truck race at the nearby short track.
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