Jim O- Fix the Traps

[M Jones]

It has been posted on here before, aircraft nets ( not cables ) with there adjustable tension levels, Pour a set of foundations at all tracks, haul the equipment with safety safari, only have to have 1 set of turbines and net, It would take some testing to set it for drag racing, What price is NHRA putting on there racers, one set up works for all tracks, I have heard of big #'s at all tracks for same old stuff after scotts death, come on NHRA step up, to many are dying

 

[Jenn]

I think you missunderstand. Keep the walls but put them where the car has to be stopped. Before grandstands or return roads. Not track side.

Why do we restrict them to 20' wide when theres 150' or more to be used.??

Other forms of racing doesn't keep cars on the racing surface. All we are doing is hurting drivers & wrecking cars needless. Let them slide on the grass to a stop. No harm.

Seems to work for nascar & Indy 500...

Gee, I dunno, maybe because an out of control, unconscious driver could drive into the grandstands and kill spectators?

Have you missed those incidents where cars drive into the crowd? Or the WOO cars the flip over the guardrails and into the parking lots?

Then you get those spectators who will complain about everything complaining that the cars are too far away because of the extra distance you'd need to keep the speckies and the racers safe.

NHRA owns a few tracks, yes, but there are tracks out there that are independently owned (so to speak) with budgets and city and local regulations etc to deal with. I think that each track owner, manager, safety safari, etc does the best job possible given each situation in preparation for an event. I don't think there is willful negligence.

If each track had to be a certain length, width, color, temperature, altitude, you'd lose tracks.

If the name of the game is making everything universal so every race track is the same, why don't we just run at one track 23 times a year?

Racing is dangerous, and despite the best intentions and efforts of everybody involved, sh!t does happen. It's painful, it's regrettable, it's emotionally draining. We learn from them but for every safety precaution out there, there is a still a 'freak' or in my opinion, 'God factor'.

If we want to eliminate the human injury/pain factor, we would have to eliminate the humans.

 

[Jenn]

I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm negative on these things but I like to find out the pros and cons of the situation.

 

[Speedy_Sticks]

Lol **** happens?! I dare you to say that to Jim or Connie and I can assure you they will show you the fastest way to loose weight.

 

[my friends call me Zappy]

I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm negative on these things but I like to find out the pros and cons of the situation.

PROS:
more room for driver to reel in a race car
avoid a lot of wall contact
less driver injury
less car damage
less down time (engine fails - driver pulls on to grass) less oil on track
better viewing for spectator

CONS:
......???
I can't see anything wrong with moving back the walls to give drivers more room. If ya got it...use it.

 

[DrRocket]

PROS:
more room for driver to reel in a race car
avoid a lot of wall contact
less driver injury
less car damage
less down time (engine fails - driver pulls on to grass) less oil on track
better viewing for spectator

CONS:
......???
I can't see anything wrong with moving back the walls to give drivers more room. If ya got it...use it.

There's the aspect of an unconscious driver in the seat of a car with a wide-open-throttle (And you know that's happened.) getting a good head of steam up before finally hitting a barrier, usually with disastrous results. I'd think you'd want to get a car contained before that happens.

 

[clwill]

More time for the car to get out of shape and really go crazy, you ever seen a NASCAR car go into the grass out of control? They flip 9 out of 10 times. More chance for an errant part like a wheel to get rolling into the crowd.

How many times have you seen an out of control car just turn 90-degrees and head for the wall? I've seen it a lot. The wall stops that car from building any speed and heading for the crowd. May hurt one driver, but probably saves 20 spectators.

Racetracks were like that for the first 25 years of the sport, there's probably a pretty darn good reason why they aren't now... Not the least of which is, ...wait for it..., the insurance companies, I'm sure.

 

[clwill]

There's the aspect of an unconscious driver in the seat of a car with a wide-open-throttle (And you know that's happened.) getting a good head of steam up before finally hitting a barrier, usually with disastrous results. I'd think you'd want to get a car contained before that happens.

You treed me

 

[my friends call me Zappy]

An unconscious driver with a WOT is gonna be bad no matter where the walls are. All I'm saying is we could avoid a lot of hurt drivers and damaged race cars by moving the walls to where a car has to be stopped. Not the side of the race track.

Example: Norwalk, FC, Jim Head would not have touched the wall if he had another two feet. But by having them track side he grazed it costing him time
$$$ and track clean-up.

 

[Jenn]

An unconscious driver with a WOT is gonna be bad no matter where the walls are. All I'm saying is we could avoid a lot of hurt drivers and damaged race cars by moving the walls to where a car has to be stopped. Not the side of the race track.

Example: Norwalk, FC, Jim Head would not have touched the wall if he had another two feet. But by having them track side he grazed it costing him time
$$$ and track clean-up.

That example is a poor one Zappy. You don't know if the car would have been saved with an extra two feet. He could have sashayed more, gone the other direction, hit the retaining wall and really done damage.

By moving the walls, you have a lot of incidents where the car would gain momentum and possibly change direction to a head on type of crash. Having the track closely contained would limit the amount of travel the car could twist.

 

[Toejam]

Gee, I dunno, maybe because an out of control, unconscious driver could drive into the grandstands and kill spectators?

Have you missed those incidents where cars drive into the crowd? Or the WOO cars the flip over the guardrails and into the parking lots?

Then you get those spectators who will complain about everything complaining that the cars are too far away because of the extra distance you'd need to keep the speckies and the racers safe.

NHRA owns a few tracks, yes, but there are tracks out there that are independently owned (so to speak) with budgets and city and local regulations etc to deal with. I think that each track owner, manager, safety safari, etc does the best job possible given each situation in preparation for an event. I don't think there is willful negligence.

If each track had to be a certain length, width, color, temperature, altitude, you'd lose tracks.

If the name of the game is making everything universal so every race track is the same, why don't we just run at one track 23 times a year?

Racing is dangerous, and despite the best intentions and efforts of everybody involved, sh!t does happen. It's painful, it's regrettable, it's emotionally draining. We learn from them but for every safety precaution out there, there is a still a 'freak' or in my opinion, 'God factor'.

If we want to eliminate the human injury/pain factor, we would have to eliminate the humans.

After hearing what happened to Shelly Howard, that's not impossible by any means.

 

[Spanky]

as far as the discussion of widening/opening up/removing the walls in the shut down i'd just add this...

most other forms of racing don't have the immense volatility that a nitro car does. hell the front 4rows of a nascar field don't carry the destructive ability that a fueler does when it's wound up

i know when i've been in trouble one of the first things that crosses my mind is what can i 'use' to help me out... and it's always the nearest wall. as a driver just grabbing some brake and thinking you are gonna ride it out is WAY WAY wrong. if i'm on fire... slow it down for a bit, hit the bottles, rub some concrete if i'm outta real estate. to me the sand trap is NOT an option. drivers need to realize and have a feeling for when/where the 'point of no return' occurs and stopping/saving the car isn't a realistic option

an open run off area is only gonna eliminate an option for me... and in a fuel car that has had an explosion you may very well have an engine you physically can NOT shut off.. ie eating it's own oil/fuel, cracked manifold, destroyed controls, unconscious driver, etc

i say plant corn!! and i'm not freakin kidding!! we run a lot of smaller tracks and several have nice soft corn fields at the end (eddyville and cedar falls come to mind) and i'd drive off into those fields way way before i'd wanna hit any sand trap! and i've seen it done many many times... with almost NO damage to the driver/car/fans... only a pissy farmer to deal with

of course track locals and real estate all play into this too. might also consider how far a run away fueler could get from fire/safety crews/help before it ever stopped??

ok... that's my $0.02 on the matter

ps- i'm only talking about things i have personally been thru and experienced... not just guessing. i also know that every time the boys lower the body over me i'm taking the chance that it may be the last time and something entirely out of my hands and control may happen. i've always said if you can't honestly say that and don't have a healthy respect (i hesitate to call it fear but whatever you choose) for that statement... then you shouldn't be in the cockpit. for your sake, your competitor's sake and the innocent fan's sake

 

[90-percent]

I think Doug Kerhulas was not seriously injured in the Columbus catch net incident. But, I think he had a similar incident at Bakersfield that left him with permanent serious injuries, perhaps brain related?

The Force Family show must go on attitude reminds me of the Flying Wallenda Family of tightrope walking circus fame - they had a few tragedies and deaths in their family and they kept on going. It's just what they do.

NHRA bashing - my favorite drag racing oriented internet message board hobby. NHRA practices quintessential corporate CRONY CAPITALISM; an inbred Board of directors and Management to insure that there are minimal checks and balances to doing what they do best - EXTRACTION of money in any way possible. And in keeping with current Harvard MBA practices, in the shortest amount of time with no consideration what so ever to any long term goals or growth or health of the organization and sport of which they serve. Corporate types have a gift for leapfrogging, as soon as the company they are running into the ground is on life support, they sell out to others and leapfrog to other healthier enterprises so they can milk that one dry once again. Note that the Board of NHRA did indeed try to do this, but the consortium they were selling to did their homework and backed out. Compton and the others have the proper skill set to effortlessly leapfrog over to some nail clipper corporate conglomerate and run them into the ground after he gets done with NHRA.

A saying I got from a pioneering Funny Car friend of mine is: NHRA would step over a dollar to pick up a dime. They are fighting as hard as possible to extract as much money as possible from a pie they themselves are shrinking. They are not wise enough to even think of growing the pie, just make their slice bigger and everybody else can go screw.

Simple logic tells us there is a sound technological answer to the top end high speed crash problem - there is aircraft carrier tech, runaway truck tech, highway water barrel tech, Indy and Nascar crash tech, and so on. Technology for everything on this planet is EXPLODING and I feel there is an eventually tech solution to almost everything, if there's the money AND THE WILL to seek it out. The development of the HANS device is one example. That was by the benevolence of GM and I hope by now they enjoy some kind of money or PR rewards for making a big contribution to race driver safety. GM DID NOT DO THIS FOR THE MONEY! They seemed to do it for simple basic human reasons - they saw they could help fellow human beings, many of which they probably knew personally through racing involvement, and decided they had the resources to make racing safer, because that's what all of us do in our lives in one way or another.

As Jon Asher has said here, if Carl Olsen was still at NHRA, perhaps at least Scott's death could have been avoided or he could have survived. (Johnny West survived an estimated 90 mph head on with the guardrail back in the early 90's there with no serious injury) Jon said Olsen WALKED EACH big show track COMPLETELY before a race and flagged things that needed a fix. I've said elsewhere here that there are people that made the conscious decisions for the Seattle arrangements. We will probably never know their names, but people in NHRA certainly do. There must be some reason they didn't avail themselves of the extra shut off length they did not use, but it sure seems that for all races for all tracks, they should always take advantage of every possibility on the table.

NHRA, in their atmosphere of maximizing money extraction from anybody that enters their playground, seems to have an attitude that racers are merely marks to invent new ways to extract money from, and therefore perhaps don't respect them for being fellow human beings as much as they should? NHRA will loudly protest otherwise, but you merely have to look at their actions after each of the recent tragedies to see if it matches their rhetoric. (I also think that fans, sponsors, tee shirt vendors, concession stands and any other entity that enters their playground is nothing more than a new mark to them. Just rubes their to get their pockets picked)

To contradict the above, I give them credit for the strong moves after Scott with 1,000 feet and beefed up sandtraps. But, with the Niver incident, I really don't see how carbon fiber is the best way to prevent an accident like Niver's again. Why victimize the racers with more costs when it's obvious the Top End safety engineering and sand trap prep is the problem?

In conclusion, I feel it is all attitude with NHRA. Warren Johnson claims attendance is down 30-50%. At many corporations, heads would roll. With NHRA's elimination of most checks and balances, that is never going to happen. Instead, they will probably do obnoxious stuff like make Tony Pedregon remove his ADRL signage, instead of looking at that organization and asking; "How come they're growing and we're shrinking?"

-90% Jimmy

 

[Jenn]

That example is a poor one Zappy. You don't know if the car would have been saved with an extra two feet. He could have sashayed more, gone the other direction, hit the retaining wall and really done damage.

Not only that, but Head has a lot of years out there. There are a lot of people on those tracks just starting to race with little more experience than Frank Hawley's.

 

[Paul]

90% Jimmy-

I agree with pretty much everything in your post, unfortunately I guess since it paints a pretty black picture.

I didn't realize that Carl Olsen took a proactive approach to insuring driver safety, ie walking the track and I'm sure many similar efforts to make it safe for the drivers.

Among many other things, it really concerns me that the NHRA currently doesn't have anyone taking a proactive approach to both driver and spectator safety. I think a full time Safety Director is required, someone who really understands the sport and is trusted by the racers who can look both at short term issues and long term planning. Somebody like John Medlen comes to mind.

The NHRA organization is one of the strangest ones I've ever seen in terms of how it is run and controlled. As you pointed out there are no "check and balances" as the board quietly removed any voting control from the NHRA members in a "special" vote held a few years back. After that vote (which I believe could be subject to a legal challenge) total control of the NHRA was put in the board members hands alone. They don't own the NHRA (and there are no other private owners, as a non-profit it can have no private ownership) but they totally control it.

The only way a current board member can be removed is through the vote of the other board members, so its become a really "in-bred" group with no concern about getting removed if the company does not perform well.

At least financially there are limits on how much the current board members can profit from the NHRA. They can pay themselves fat salaries but if they had tried to directly profit from the attempted sale a few years ago they would have been breaking the law. However, their upside was the "new" organization would have been free of the non-profit designation and they would have been able to potentially profit from stock positions in that new organization.

Unless something drastic happens, ie a new drag racing organization or a legal challenge to the boards "takeover" of the NHRA, I think the current board is going to slowly "fly the plane" right into the ground, that's what they've been doing over the past few years.

 

[90-percent]

Paul - here's Jon Asher's post where I learned of Carl Olson walking the track before a big meet. I consider it extremely profound in light of all the fatal accidents of late.

http://www.nitromater.com/nhra/25271-vegas-p-r-o-meeting-6.html#post243040

-jim

 

[my friends call me Zappy]

Jenn I was sitting right there. Jim just grazed the wall. With more room there would have been NO contact, NO damage - No track clean up. Theres more chance of cars rolling or hitting the other car, when you keep them on the track. We've all seen cars spin & slide to a safe stop on the grass in nascar & Indy.

Lets give our guy's the same chance. Theres no reason to stop a car before it absolutely has to be stopped.

 

[G'ginna]

We've all seen cars spin & slide to a safe stop on the grass in nascar & Indy.

Respectfully, Zappy, we have also all seen them get sideways catch air and cartwheel into scrap metal and have drivers taken to the hospital with the "Do Not Pass Go" lights flashing. In all honesty, with all the variables there can be for every accident, IMO no single solution is going to protect everyone. Sometimes too those solutions will have to be weighed as to what will give the greater good or cost fewer potential lives.

 

[Jenn]

Jenn I was sitting right there. Jim just grazed the wall. With more room there would have been NO contact, NO damage - No track clean up. Theres more chance of cars rolling or hitting the other car, when you keep them on the track. We've all seen cars spin & slide to a safe stop on the grass in nascar & Indy.

Lets give our guy's the same chance. Theres no reason to stop a car before it absolutely has to be stopped.

What or who is going to determine what each individual car is going to need to be stopped? Who is going to know that the driver in the car has his wits about him to stop 'driving' the car? Ashley Force made contact with the wall her rookie year, because by her own admission she was inexperienced.

Other drivers have used the wall because they were experienced and wanted to scrub off speed when they were on fire....had no brakes, or would rather rub the wall than rub the guy in the other lane because they didn't know where they were. How many seconds (precious seconds) were gained by scrubbing off that speed and allowing the driver to exit.

Troy Chritchley, no barriers, killed how many? How far would those people have had to have been not to get hurt? Troy drove into a solid object to get it stopped.

 

[Paul]

Paul - here's Jon Asher's post where I learned of Carl Olson walking the track before a big meet. I consider it extremely profound in light of all the fatal accidents of late.

http://www.nitromater.com/nhra/25271-vegas-p-r-o-meeting-6.html#post243040

-jim

Jim, thanks for pointing that out, and I don't Jon would mind if I directly quoted what he said:

"Terry Almy makes an excellent point about those with racing experience having been purged from the NHRA hierarchy. In the case of Carl Olson I would respectfully suggest that had he still been an NHRA employee not one single car would have gone down Englishtown’s track with the TV camera extended across the sand trap. Olson visually inspected – slowly and meticulously – every single foot of every drag strip that NHRA ran on before competition began. More than once the start of time trials was held up while something he’d spotted was repaired, removed or replaced. Forgetting for a moment everything else he did for NHRA, that alone made his employment worthwhile for everyone."

This kind of dedication to driver safety is sorely missing in the NHRA now.
In addition, this function was specifically pointed out as a fundamental one in NHRA's original non-profit company filings.

They're not doing a good job of performing one of their key responsibilities and hope one way or another they get pressured into fixing this situation.