By JIM
McLAURIN
Staff Writer
Call it a
horrible coincidence. Call it a problem. Call it what you will. Just don't
ignore it.
With the deaths of two
drivers at nearly the same spot on the same racetrack within two months in
remarkably similar circumstances, there is more going on than meets the eye.
"I think it's a
combination of things," said Larry McReynolds, the crew chief on Mike
Skinner's No. 31 Winston Cup Chevrolet. "But there's no doubt we've got a
problem. We can't all just sit back and wait for the next one to happen."
McReynolds, in addition
to being one of the best crew chiefs, is one of the more astute observers of
stock car racing.
"Is it a problem
with Loudon, N.H., any more than it is a problem with Indianapolis or Pocono or
Richmond?" McReynolds said. "Anywhere where you've got a flat
entrance with no banking to scrub the speed off, you've got the potential for a
problem.
"Maybe I'm just
missing something totally, but there's no question in my mind that it was just
coincidental that both these situations happened at Loudon, N.H."
The death of 19-year-old
Adam Petty on May 12, followed by the fatal crash of Winston Cup driver Kenny
Irwin two weeks ago at New Hampshire International Speedway, has the whole
racing world scratching its head and digging for answers.
The early consensus was,
and to some extent still is, that the throttles stuck on both Petty's No. 45
Busch Series car and Irwin's No. 42 Winston Cup car as they entered the third
turn.
While a problem at some
tracks, a stuck throttle is not always life-threatening because the steeper
banking enables the car to lose some speed before it impacts the wall.
At tracks with relatively
little banking in the turns -- at New Hampshire it's 12 degrees, at
Miami-Homestead 9.25 -- they don't have that luxury. Even with the driver
jamming on the brakes, it only takes fractions of a second before a car hits
the wall.
No one is positive,
however, that a hung throttle was the cause.
"Specifically, we
are still undergoing an investigation," said Mike Helton, NASCAR's chief
operating officer. "We have not found anything conclusive at this point,
but we looked at the car with a lot of help from different people within the
garage area. Certainly there may be something that comes out of the
investigation.
"NASCAR is always
working on safety elements and issues, and after Adam's accident in May we
heightened the look at accelerators, carburetors and the linkage in between and
we're very heavily active right now trying to see what NASCAR may be able to
react to."
There have always been
hung throttles, and for myriad reasons. Often, the steel rod that connects the
carburetor becomes pinched between the air cleaner and the engine during a
race. A piece of tape may come off the air cleaner and cause the linkage to
stick or a "booster", a device in each barrel of the carburetor, may
break and cause the throttle to hang.
But there are remedies
for that. The simplest is a toe strap, a device that fits over the end of the
accelerator pedal much like the toe of a shoe, that allows a driver to manually
unstick the throttle by pulling his foot off the accelerator.
That's fine, noted
defending Winston Cup champion Dale Jarrett, if you have time to use it.
"I've had throttles
hang," Jarrett said. "It's the worst feeling that a driver will ever
have. I've told my son Jason, he's had it happen twice already and I told him,
'You've experienced the worst thing.' That and fire, but that's just the most
helpless feeling, especially on a shorter type race track where you have no
banking. You can't react quick enough. Your first reactions are to stomp on the
brakes and that doesn't do anything when you're going wide open. It's a
terrible feeling."
One step further,
McReynolds said, is a kill switch located near the driver's hands on the
steering wheel, but even that relies on a driver's reaction time. The third
option is to take it out of his hands with an automatic kill switch.
"We've looked at
what the modifieds run," McReynolds said. "It's not driver-activated.
It's in a little tube and it connects to the throttle rod. It has a microswitch
in it and if the throttle doesn't return and there's no pressure applied to the
accelerator, that microswitch will come apart and it will kill the power to the
motor.
"You think about all
these things that a driver can do, but he's got only a millisecond to do it.
Most of these places, you're pretty deep into the corner before you back off
the throttle anyhow. An automatic kill switch might help."
The other area being
closely examined is the walls themselves. All Winston Cup tracks have solid
concrete walls, some with dirt banking behind them. At Indianapolis and both
road courses on which the Winston Cup cars run, they also have Styrofoam
barriers in front of the concrete.
The one or two feet of
foam between the wall and the car, McReynolds said, could make the difference
between a driver being sore and a driver not surviving a hard impact.
"I go back to two or
three weeks ago and Jimmie Johnson's wreck in the Busch Series race at Watkins
Glen," McReynolds said. "God knows how fast that boy was running when
he hit that wall head-on. But there was a significant thickness of foam there
and a guard rail behind it that has a little bit of give.
"I'm totally against
guard rails by themselves because they're dangerous. But if you take a guard
rail that has a little give to it and put a two-foot thick foam barrier in
front of it, you might have something to solve a lot of this."
It is not a panacea, but
it might be a step in the right direction.
"It is another thing
we're looking at," said Kevin Triplett, NASCAR's director of operations.
"For every action, there is a reaction. If somebody hits one of those
barriers and kicks the rest of that barrier out in front of everybody else,
what does that create?
"At a road course
race three weeks ago, a team had to go to a backup car because of the damage
done to their car when two cars in front of them hit a barrier and kicked it
out in front of them. That's why when we react, we try to react with something
that has more positives than negatives."
The key word, McReynolds
said, is "react."
"The one thing you
don't want to do is to say, 'Next year when we build new tracks we can do
this,' " McReynolds said. "We need to fix it now. Loudon needs to be
fixed before we go back there in September. We need for it to happen at Pocono
before we go there.
"There's no question
in my mind that they (NASCAR) are taking it seriously, trying to figure out
where to go and what to do with it."