There is fearful talk now of the “rigidity” of NASCAR race cars.
There is groping for reasons why they have so suddenly become coffins–the death chambers of four drivers they were meant to protect, in just nine months, all under very similar circumstances.
To be sure, they are too stiff, too unyielding when they hit concrete. They do not deform–“crush” is the simple but all-encompassing technical term–as well as their distant cousins, Formula One and Indy cars, to absorb crash energy before it can ravage drivers’ bodies. Instead, the Winston Cup cars seem to direct horrific energy to the man inside. Because they won’t give, he must.
But that has been so for about a decade. What has gone so terribly wrong with them lately?
There is no better authority in Winston Cup racing than team owner Robert Yates. The cars his engineers and technicians build are as good and as safe as they can be under current conditions. He knows every piece of those cars intimately, inside out.
Just Friday, one of his drivers, Dale Jarrett, won the pole for Sunday’s UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Yates’ cars have won three Daytona 500s and a Winston Cup.
He is simply the best there is.
And he is frightened. His gestures with his hands said so Friday.
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And his eyes were pleading.
“We can’t do this,” he said.
If the death parade continues, “I wouldn’t go watch it,” he said on behalf of millions of fans.
“I wouldn’t sponsor it,” he said for all the corporations involved.
“I wouldn’t want to be part of it,” he said for himself.
He sighed and uttered words far more revolutionary in NASCAR than they will sound to you, the layman.
“Let’s go to the experts,” he said.
Those words were monumental. Towering.
Yates epitomizes what NASCAR officials mean when they suggest leaving matters of safety to the “smartest guys in the world–the ones in these garages.”
He is pleading for help. NASCAR’s rugged individualism, the self-reliance and seat-of-the-pants engineering, the very elements that have made it appeal to grass-roots America, now must defer to science.
He is the best there is at what he does, but now he knows that is no longer good enough.
He has a pretty good idea what has gone wrong with the cars. He doesn’t trust his savvy, deep as it is, to correct the problems.
Circa 1996, the best engineers and chassis mechanics went in search of a new concept they called “tortional stiffness”–that is, they wanted to make the chassis, which include the roll cages, stop “flexing” under the centrifugal force of cornering. That would make the cars drive better, corner faster. So they made them stronger, stiffer. Then last year, NASCAR mandated larger tubular steel bars for the roll caging.
All told, it meant stronger cars. Cars that were even more unyielding. They would give even less. The drivers would have to give even more on impact.
“Today you hear in the garage area, `Oh, if they hadn’t stiffened up the A-frames [the front of the chassis],'” Yates said.
“That’s not right. I don’t think the cars have changed in that respect since ’96, really.”
As for the thicker roll-cage tubing, “Let’s not write it off to that,” he said.
To Yates, it’s not so much a matter of what has been done to the cars, but what has been undone in them.
“We’ve taken so much of the `crush zoning’ out of the cars,” he said. “Until ’93 or ’94, we had big steel bumpers on them. Steel front ends [the front bodywork]. Big, 4-inch-thick radiators. Now we have fiberglass bumpers and front ends. Radiators are down to 2 inches thick–and some of them are gone entirely [from some teams’ cars].
“It’s to the point that cars don’t `know’ they’re hitting the wall until [the sudden, violent, inward crush] gets all the way to the engine. The cars need to `know’ they’re hitting the wall about a foot farther out than that.”
That is, instead of flimsy fiberglass and thin air, there needs to be crushable materials that absorb and dissipate the energy more slowly. This may be only a matter of milliseconds–but more precious milliseconds than it took all that energy to reach the body of Dale Earnhardt, and before him the bodies of Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper.
NASCAR mandates that Winston Cup cars weigh 3,400 pounds. But teams, in their relentless quest for that tick of speed to outrun the next guy, try to center all that weight as low as possible and as near the center as possible. That gives the cars great balance.
“There’s not enough material out front,” Yates said.
“And we don’t have the crush zoning that we had five years ago–certainly not what we had 10 years ago.”
That’s because materials used in that area are lighter, flimsier, so the weight can all be spent low-center, for the precious balance.
He would like to change that–indeed, has changed it a bit in his own cars. But he still must compete with others. He still must try to win races.
The only way to de-escalate the performance war would be if NASCAR mandated uniform crush zoning for all the cars. If NASCAR continues to allow leeway in the chassis configurations, then teams will have to take that leeway–to be competitive, to stay in business.
“It would have to come from NASCAR, to put additional guards out front in the car,” Yates said. “If they knew exactly what to mandate. That means go to the experts, get the technology, prove it in bench tests, and apply it.
“It would have to come from somebody who understood the crush zones.”
That means the Detroit manufacturers, who “crash test every day–it’s federal law,” said Garth Finley, one of Yates’ top chassis engineers.
“We have all three major American manufacturers [DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors] involved in this sport,” Yates said.
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“We have a great opportunity to get them involved. And they would love to get involved.”
Indeed, the Detroit engineers have been anguishing privately for the last couple of years that they could bring so much science, so much technology to the safety effort–if NASCAR would only let them.
All the Detroit manufacturers, plus European makes such as Mercedes-Benz, have been converging their technology in the Wayne State University offices of John Melvin, who for 30 years has labored in obscurity for racing safety–first at the University of Michigan, then at GM–and in recent years he has been conducting the most advanced racing safety research in the world.
“Let’s go to the experts,” Yates said–the words became his litany as the afternoon went on. He has seen carbon fiber “crush boxes,” light and small, that “work very well in Formula One. They even use them in passenger cars.”
Everything at Yates’s massive racing “shop”–it is more precisely a factory–is done scientifically, with high technology . . . everything but crash testing.
“We bench-test all our engines; our valve trains. We take our cars to wind tunnels. And there is bench-testing for crashing these cars.
“The technology is there.”
No one in NASCAR competition is more qualified to speak than Yates, not just technically, but morally.
He saw this coming–Lord knows he saw it coming, nearly seven years ago. It was in one of his Fords that Ernie Irvan very nearly died of injuries eerily similar to those that killed Petty, Irwin, Roper and Earnhardt.
Robert Yates began pleading with NASCAR then. For more forgiving crush materials in cars. For less rigidity in the roll cages.
He had learned “from an hour with one of Ford’s crash-test engineers” so many simple things “that would have allowed Ernie to walk away from that wreck.”
He pleaded with the eloquence of the son of one of North Carolina’s top old-time Baptist preachers.
“But somehow, we just went on racing.”
And now it’s come to this. And even now there resides in NASCAR the stubborn old fatalism, the “it was just his time” mentality.
“I don’t like to hear, `When it’s your time, it’s your time,'” the son of the preacherman said. “I don’t believe that. God probably has it figured out. But he gives you an option. He has given you your head to use.”