Published: Sunday, July 23, 2000

Barry Svrluga: Safety: on a slow track

Rusty Wallace will start on the outside of the front row in today's Pennsylvania 500. He'll be right alongside pole-sitter Tony Stewart as the pair lead 41 other drivers down Pocono Raceway's airstrip of a frontstretch. They'll lead the field into a monster of a first turn -- where they'll stare straight at a concrete wall -- and then tear off around Pocono's odd triangle-shaped track.

And Wallace will see it. If he stays in the race the whole way today, he'll see it 200 times.

The spot he nailed on the wall at Pocono last year, the spot that absorbed what Wallace still calls the hardest hit he has taken in a stock-car racing career that spans 25 years.

The spot that caused him to feel what a couple of other guys must have felt in recent months. We'll just never know.

"It's just a sickening feeling to be going wide-open at a wall and knowing that, man, this might be your last day right here," Wallace said last year, only a couple of months after his accident. "You might get your lights knocked out -- that's it."

As he said it, sitting in his plush motor coach at Indianapolis Motor Speedway last August, he was somehow serious and flip at the same time. Serious: Yeah, man, it really hurt, and I don't want to do it again. Flip: Hey, sure, I could have died had the hit come at a different angle, but that's not something to think about.

Statements like that carry a little more weight now than they did when Wallace said them, almost a year ago. Since then, two young race-car drivers have died hitting walls. Not the wall at Pocono, but the wall at New Hampshire International Speedway.

The details are grim but must be recounted in each discussion of the tragedies.

Adam Petty died in practice for a minor-league Busch Grand National race May 12. His throttle apparently "hung," or stuck, thus making the car impossible to stop. He hit with mighty force into the wall in turn three.

Kenny Irwin died in practice for a Winston Cup race July 7. His throttle apparently hung, thus making the car impossible to stop. He hit with mighty force into the wall in turn three.

The cavalier attitude of Wallace and plenty of other drivers must be placed aside by now. It is easy to be confident and cocky when the last death in a Winston Cup car came in 1994, when it came at Daytona International Speedway. Consider all the safety improvements made since those days when Neil Bonnett and Rodney Orr died six years ago -- roof flaps that keep the cars on the track in an accident chief among them -- and Wallace could afford to say things like he did last year, even after absorbing such a violent collision.

But if Wallace were to head straight into that same wall at Pocono today, would his feelings be any different? No doubt, it would still be "sickening." But it would be a different type of sickening. A pit-of-the-stomach, other-guys-just-died-doing-this kind of sickening.

He won't be able to feel any different because -- more than two weeks after Irwin's death, more than two months after Petty's -- NASCAR has done nothing to give drivers or fans any reason to feel this couldn't happen again.

Enough already? You're sick of hearing about safety and death? Let's get back to racin', right?

That's not good enough for some fans. Some are concerned. Very concerned. Concerned enough that they started a Web site, F4SRT -- Fans for Safer RaceTracks.

The premise -- and introduction -- are quite simple. The message is directed right at NASCAR. Look harder at using some sort of foam padding on the walls. Show us you're moving forward. Do something.

"It's time that the fans take action and demand the safety of the drivers," it says. "If the sanctioning bodies of NASCAR, CART and IRL continue to ignore this safety measure, then maybe the sponsors will demand this change."

A list of sponsors follows, with a note urging concerned fans to contact the companies, to remind them that while sponsoring NASCAR can be good for business, being associated with death -- as Petty's sponsor Sprint and Irwin's sponsor BellSouth found out -- doesn't feel so great.

This is not to say that NASCAR shows no concern. The sanctioning body of stock-car racing is looking at making technology that already exists -- toe loops on the gas pedal that would allow drivers to manually pull the pedal up, engine kill switches that are easier to use -- mandatory.

But for now, nothing. NASCAR chief operating officer Mike Helton told reporters this week at Pocono that NASCAR is not going to react just for the sake of reacting, that it's going to take its time in considering what -- if any -- safety changes need to be made.

But what good will that calm, measured approach do if Wallace or someone else heads to that wall at Pocono, a frighteningly fast track? Exactly none.