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Wednesday, August 22 No safety changes are imminent By Jim Litke Associated Press NASCAR finally admitted that opening up an R&D department might be a good idea. Until Tuesday, the only research and development the stock-car circuit did for nearly all of its 52 years was investigate crashes -- after the fact. That's because, for way too long, race cars were considered too expensive to crash-test and lives just cheap enough. But the death of Dale Earnhardt and three others drivers in the last 18 months have altered the equation. So things are about to change. A little. "There's not a bulletin getting ready to go out this afternoon to change walls at race tracks or roll bars in race cars," NASCAR president Mike Helton said Tuesday. "But there was an effort that began this time last year, and that became very aggressive as we were given opportunities in a very tragic way to understand things that we never understood before." For all the long faces at a news conference in Atlanta, nothing will look different when the drivers gather at next weekend's oval. Head and neck safety devices still won't be mandatory. Neither the cars nor the tracks will be configured differently. A cynic might conclude that NASCAR took six months, hired 54 experts and spent $1 million to confirm that Earnhardt died in a car crash. A two-volume, 3-inch-thick report determined Earnhardt's car was traveling about 160 mph when it veered up the track and into Ken Schrader's car; that his seat belt snapped when his car hit the wall at a critical angle; and that the result was blunt force injuries to the head. The report was less certain about how to prevent the same thing from happening to the next driver who finds himself careening toward a similar fate. "We are still not going to react," Helton said more than once, "for the sake of reacting." Nor is NASCAR going to react anytime soon. Helton announced that an R&D center will be opened in Conover, N.C. -- sometime next year. And that "black boxes," similar to flight-data recorders on airplanes, will be installed in the cars -- next season. And that there will be crash-testing and computer-modeling for restraint systems and race track barriers, plus a full-time medical liaison to coordinate care with local tracks and medical personnel -- again, next year. The CART circuit has had those measures in place for several years now and most have been adopted by the fledgling Indy Racing League. The simple fact is that safety costs money, and for most of its history, NASCAR's drivers have paid the price. Advances in safety tended to follow crashes that resulted in deaths or serious injuries. A few mandated changes to the cars, such as a piece of tubing on the frame known as a (Richard) Petty bar, were named after the drivers whose crashes inspired them. For their part, the racers were near-unanimous in praising NASCAR for opening up lines of communication. They're brave enough to sit in cars weighing nearly three tons while they hurtle around a track at nearly 200 mph, but not to make demands on a set of secretive bosses doing business at their own slow pace. The only good thing is that few drivers actually waited for the release of the report to take action on their own. No more than a handful wore the head and neck safety devices last February at Daytona Motor Speedway in the race that claimed Earnhardt's life. Six weeks ago, when NASCAR returned to Daytona and Dale Earnhardt Jr. won on the same track that claimed his father, 33 of the 43 drivers were outfitted that way. Last weekend at Michigan, 41 of the 43, including Little E, had them on. "Mandating is not a wise thing at this time," Helton said. "We think there still are some things we need to understand more completely." Strange, isn't it? NASCAR has no problem devising rules that slow down the cars and make them run closer together, that produce the kind of white-knuckle racing at Talladega and Daytona that fans love and drivers dread. But mandating equipment that would make the cars safer still appears somehow beyond their reach. Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke@ap.org.  Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
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