Wednesday, February 21, 2001
NASCAR's better safe than sorry
Just because Dale Earnhardt died doing what he loved doesn't make him any less dead. It doesn't give his wife someone to talk to or his kids a father to hug.
When a fighter dies, we want to ban boxing. If four died in a year, we'd have a federal investigation.
In racing we say, well, uh, geez, at least The Intimidator died with his boots on.
Tragedy lingers until something is done to make it go away. What NASCAR is doing about tragedy is not much. “We're not going to react just for the sake of reacting,” announced NASCAR president Mike Helton.
Right, yes. Wouldn't want to be hasty. Four NASCAR drivers have died in nine months, all from hitting concrete walls.
When does the body count become unacceptable? How many drivers have to die in the prime of life before NASCAR considers reacting to be a logical act?
Enough is enough
After the first death, you make the walls out of goose down, don't you? You make drivers wear closed helmets, not open-faced jobs such as the one Earnhardt wore.
You take this HANS device and bolt it into every seat in every stock car. If, as some drivers say, the head and neck restraint device might make it harder to escape a burning and/or smoking car, you tweak the technology and fix the problem.
Steve Overbeck, local garage maestro and owner of the Aramark Racing Team that sponsors his son, Spanks, said NASCAR is working on softer walls.
If the tech geniuses can figure ways to streamline vehicles and hype motors to achieve inhuman speeds, they can find a way to soften walls so drivers don't die.
If they want to. Which, maybe, they really don't.
No other sport relies on such visceral possibilities for its thrills. Fans like a whiff of danger. Some love the crashes. “Competitive” races equal “races with wrecks.”
“The wrecks are a result of close competition,” Spanks Overbeck said.
He'll run 25 to 30 times this year in the Gatorade All-Pro Series. “A lot of people do go to see the wrecks, (but) I think a true NASCAR fan likes to see competitive racing.”
NASCAR tweaked the rules at Daytona this year for just that reason. The new rules didn't increase safety. They made racing more dangerous. Excuse me, more “competitive.” If someone said, “We are here today to guarantee you won't see a wreck in any race for the next 20 years,” how many race fans would there be?
Improvements can be made
Is there another sport where death is so matter-of-fact? “Everybody knows it's an acceptable danger,” Steve Overbeck said.
With all due respect, he has to be kidding.
“How many times does something have to be a problem before we fix it?” Spanks Overbeck wondered. He's an engineer, a UC grad. He knows the power of technology. After Adam Petty died in a Busch race in May, apparently because of a stuck throttle, they mounted a kill switch on Spanks' steering wheel.
Improvements can be made so people don't die. If NASCAR's interested.
If not, Earnhardt will become James Dean, and the candle-lit shrines to his memory will light the night for 100 years.
And more drivers will die of skull fractures.
What a sport.
E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.
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DAUGHERTY: NASCAR's better safe than sorry