NASCAR opening new information highway

Mike Harris

Thursday, Aug. 30, 2001 | 10:13 a.m.

The number even made Mauricio Gugelmin gulp. The CART driver's engineer had just informed him the impact from his crash at Chicago Motor Speedway had produced 123 G's in 0.03 seconds.

"Man, and all I've got is a headache and some soreness in my shoulders," the CART driver said, shaking his head in wonder.

In recent years, teams in CART, the rival Indy Racing League and Formula One have all had virtually instantaneous access to crash data, thanks to "black boxes" similar to those used to record data in aircraft.

More importantly, the data is being used to make the cars safer.

Beginning sometime in 2002, NASCAR will join the crowd.

Mike Helton, NASCAR's president, made that announcement Aug. 21 as the circuit released results of its six-month investigation into the death of Dale Earnhardt.

Dr. John Melvin, then working for General Motors as a biomedical research scientist, and John Pierce, then a GM racing engineer, first developed racing's black boxes in 1991 to support the newly formed GM Racing Safety Program.

Early attempts at racing accident reconstruction had shown only limited results were available from analyzing photographs, videos, tire skid marks and car wreckage.

Accustomed to working with detailed data from highly instrumented production vehicles subjected to barrier tests, Melvin and Pierce, both now independent safety consultants, knew a suitable crash recorder was needed.

While writing a purchase order to have specialized racing impact recorders custom-built to their specifications, they discovered a company in Okemos, Mich., called Instrumented Sensor Technology. The company produced a battery-powered impact recorder that was used to monitor shipments of sensitive and costly equipment such as supercomputers and the space shuttle's booster rockets.

After being adapted for use in race cars, the crash recorders were formally approved for the first time by the United States Auto Club for installation on cars competing in the 1993 Indianapolis 500 and were made mandatory for all Indy car races later that year in the CART series.

Since then, Delphi Automotive Systems has introduced Accident Data Loggers to Formula One and Formula 3000 and worked with GM on introducing them to the IRL, while Ford and IST took on the program in CART, calling them "blue boxes."

Glen Gray, Delphi's engineering manager for motorsports, said, "The boxes are intended to give medical and biomedical information on what happens in an accident to the driver and the car."

John Valentine, chief engineer for Ford said, "In safety terms, the G load recorded is not by itself a telling assessment of an impact. The time or duration that the load was applied is equally critical."

Referring to a crash earlier this year in Long Beach, Calif., during a CART race, Valentine said a 130-G impact was dissipated through the car and driver and there was no injury.

"Yet a load of as little as 10 G's, when applied over a longer period of time, could prove fatal," Valentine added.

Delphi's boxes also read things such as the rate of the car's spin and have what Gray called "external inputs," which give information on the strain on the driver's seat belt harness and data on his head movement.

Even more advance technology is coming soon, according to Gray.

"We'll probably have more memory available, and the boxes will not only log the accident, but four, five, six laps before the accident," he said. "Then we'll be able to see if the driver drove a different line and did that have something to do with the accident."

NASCAR has made no decision on which company will provide its new technology, but Delphi made a proposal and has begun preliminary testing with the Hendrick Motorsports team, which already uses some of its products.

"Our boxes are really built for the purpose," Gray said. "We've actually had boxes come out of the car during accidents and still work. They're built to take that kind of punishment."

Although safety experts have prodded NASCAR to use the boxes for years, it resisted, in part because of fears the information might be used for competitive advantages.

"One of the big reasons that's kept them out in our type of racing is that concern about the ability to be used for telemetry enhancement in the cars," Helton said.

"But the technology of those boxes has gotten to the point now where we think we can manage them ourselves without any interference from the crew chiefs or the electronic wizards the teams have."

Jeff Burton, one of NASCAR's most safety conscious drivers, called the boxes "a big step in the right direction."

"We need all the information we can get to protect the drivers," he said.