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Study Shows Deaths Rising at Small Tracks
Newsobserver.com has run a study of deaths in motor racing during the last 20 years and found some surprising information. While large oval tracks and superspeedways cut their deaths from at least 24 to at least 10 in the past decade, small tracks continue to account for half of all racing deaths - at least 121 deaths since 2001, up slightly from at least 115 the decade before.
Drag racing has had the biggest increase in deaths, jumping from at least 42 deaths in the decade before 2001 to at least 58 since. In 2010, at least seven people died at drag races.
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Supporting Safety
Mark Aumann writes at NASCAR.com that it has taken 25 years for the HANS Device to be accepted in racing. "Crash test results showed the product worked well, but Downing had a hard time convincing other drivers to try it. In the first 10 years, Downing estimated he sold no more than 250 HANS devices."
"If we sold one a month, it would be amazing," Downing said. "Frankly, it got to be pretty discouraging."
"But when four NASCAR drivers were killed within an eight-month span, including Earnhardt Sr., suddenly everybody in the garage area was knocking down the doors to get one of Downing's devices."
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Earnhardt's Death a Watershed Moment
Ed Hinton reports at ESPN.com that Dale Earnhardt's death devastated NASCAR, but may also have saved it.
He resisted the very safety innovations that could have saved his life, and yet "transformed the sport and saved everybody else's life," says Dr. John Melvin, widely considered world motor racing's foremost authority on driver safety.
Research now is focused mainly on refining all the life-saving innovations introduced since Earnhardt's death: protective seats, seat placement, better belt systems, HANS Devices, energy-dissipating "soft walls," crushable materials in the cars, and evolution of the roll cages and the cars themselves …
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Rookie Shines But Safety Was the Real Star
Ben Smith writes in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that while Trevor Bayne won the Daytona 500, the real story from this year's race was safety.
"In the blink of an eye, Kenseth got tapped on the bumper and turned straight into the wall at 200 mph, a head-on shot that happened so quickly, and with such force, you barely had time to gasp."
Smith goes on to write that ten years ago this might have been a fatal accident. However, "The SAFER barrier is what Kenseth, trussed up in a HANS device, smacked Sunday. It’s why he dropped the netting and climbed out of the car under his own steam. You want to talk about Dale Earnhardt’s legacy, 10 years on, talk about that."
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HANS Podcast on NASCAR Radio XM Channel 90
Download this 30MB audio file and listen to an interview with Gary Milgrom from HANS about how the HANS Device works as well as the new Sport II device.
