Alan, thanks for the link. Very well put, and I think that most reasonable people will have to agree that this is what needs to be done until a more permanent solution, if possible, is worked out. Having worked at the top end for 15 years I saw a lot of different facilities' answers to the gravel traps and must say that some of them were scary. Nothing like a nice raised lip to the gravel that would launch a car into the air. Or a trap that hadn't been raked for months, or maybe since last year's event, that is almost as hard as the pavement. Even the long tracks with uphill shutoff areas are not immune to the problems. I was the first one to reach Darrell Hitchman at Sonoma when he went through the trap and both nets and wound up on the hill with the TV camera. He was lucky and walked away. John Force was there in a heartbeat because Ashley was also in that class at the time. I believe it was there that he decided that there would be no TF car in her future.
As long as I worked NHRA races, I spent a lot longer in road racing, both driving and as an official, and I think that NHRA may be where road racing was a few decades ago. We lost a lot of road circuits because the cars flat outgrew them. Housing developments helped the process in some cases, but some of the old, traditional tracks we loved just became too dangerous. Ponca City in Oklahoma was a great park to race through, but after a friend of mine was killed when he hit a tree that was the end. Lake Afton in Wichita disappeared too. Fortunately, we got newer facilities like Heartland Park to replace them that were much safer. It took a while for the new tracks, but they came.
Why am I saying this? Because I think that maybe the time has come where some of the NHRA tracks are just not going to be able to handle the cars anymore unless they can be dramatically upgraded. The problem in many cases is not just spending money to raise the walls another 6 inches, but getting land that is not available to add hundreds of feet of shutdown. Problem is, NHRA owns some of these facilities and has spent a lot of money on recent changes. But let's face it, Pomona will never be able to handle the full 1320' again unless there are some major "advances". We always had five or more cars in the trap each race. Some were minor and only dropped the front end into the sand, but other were pretty major like the alcohol FC whose body flew over the fence and landed across the street by the golf course fence. People were riding bikes on the street and could have been hurt or worse.
I will get off my soapbox box, but just wanted to say that there can't be any "sacred cows" if we are going try to make this a safer sport. Cars, race distance and even tracks need to be in the potential solutions. I have lost too many friends in road racing and drag racing. I haven't liked some of the changes over the years to the racing that I love, but I do love it, and especially the people I have met and befriended, too much to make a few changes make me walk away from it. Hell, one of these days the cars may all be electric and we will have to have the noise played over the PA. I won't like it, but I will be there, God willing. Hopefully, all of you, and all of the drivers, will be too.
