NASCAR hoping for better fate this time

Dick Brinster

Thursday, Sept. 14, 2000 | 1:32 a.m.

LOUDON, N.H. - NASCAR wants to get through a weekend in New Hampshire without death being the big story.

That hasn't happened this year in its top two series, with crashes killing drivers Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin at New Hampshire International Speedway.

The sanctioning body is now trying to slow the action with restrictor plates, carburetor-choking devices that rob cars of power. Some of the top car owners and best drivers don't like the decision.

"All the pressure that all the media's brought through accentuating the concerns of a number, certainly not the majority of the drivers, has resulted in NASCAR doing something that I think is knee jerk," said owner Jack Roush, who will have five entries Sunday in the Dura Lube 300.

He is concerned about the Winston Cup teams setting up cars without any restrictor-plate data for the track where Petty was killed in May while practicing for a Busch Series event. Irwin died eight weeks later in a wreck on the same turn, the third, while preparing for a Cup race. Both drivers' throttles apparently got stuck.

Owner Robert Yates also thinks NASCAR could have taken a different approach.

"It would have been a whole lot less work if they would have fixed the race track," he said. "They knew for plenty of time that there was something wrong with that corner."

But NASCAR doesn't agree, saying the third turn on the 1.058-mile oval is safe.

"We still maintain that there's nothing wrong with the track," NASCAR vice president Mike Helton said. "Our thought with regards to the restrictor plate is obvious. The track has not changed, but the cars are faster. This will slow them down."

Gary Nelson, the Winston Cup Series director, says the top speed will be reduced by about 10 mph. He contends the soft barriers some drivers want installed would make the cars only about 2 mph slower from the time the front bumper hit the foam until the concrete behind it was reached.

The sanctioning body can guarantee nothing, although it already has mandated engine kill switches on the steering wheels. It also is allowing cars to carry a device developed by Roush Racing that would shut off the motor if the brakes were applied while the throttle was stuck.

"There is not one simple answer to solving the problem," Nelson said. "You can't eliminate every single possibility, but you try and reduce them based on what you know and what your research tells you."

Jeff Gordon and series champion Dale Jarrett are among the most vocal of those seeking change. Both say that all the racing is done on the inside of the tight turns, meaning the rest of the low-banked surface acts only as a launching pad of sorts for cars to slide at high speed toward the walls.

"Why not put some extra protection out there?" Gordon asked. "We want something to be on the walls there that can absorb some more impact."

Jarrett thinks there are no good arguments against installing some kind of soft barrier.

"It is not anything that is going to create problems," he said. "The only time you're up there is if you're in trouble. And if you're in trouble, why not have something to help out?"

But NASCAR operations director Kevin Triplett says soft walls that decompose on contact can create another set of problems with debris on the track. And he says the sanctioning body could remain open to criticism no matter what it did.

"If you bring something out 4 feet and it doesn't work, somebody will say you should have brought it out 6 feet," Triplett explained. "And how far around do you go? Suppose you put it 100 feet around and something happened at 130 feet?"

The track had operated for 10 years without any deaths, but two in two months created a perception in some minds that it's more dangerous than most.

And that probably won't change for a while. The death of Petty - the 19-year-old driver from stock car racing's most famous family - followed by that of Irwin in the same turn almost guarantees it.

The track in Imola, Italy, for example, is still remembered primarily as the place where Formula One great Ayrton Senna was killed six years ago.

NASCAR considers the deaths to be tragic coincidences, but understands the perception.

"It's human nature to react when something happens," Triplett said.

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