Drivers are using Gordon’s crash as call for more safety

HAMPTON, Ga. — Jeff Gordon doesn’t want to see the wreck. He doesn’t need a reminder of last week’s horrific hit at Las Vegas. He’s feeling it every day.

Gordon admits he’s lucky to walk away from a wreck that stunned members of the NASCAR community. After hitting a jutted-out section of an infield entry point on the infield wall at Las Vegas, Gordon’s DuPont Chevrolet shredded into pieces. His radiator flew several yards.

His body was jerked with such force that “I was blown away by how big it was,” he recalled Friday.

“I’m sore all over. Little things keep popping up. My (left) elbow hurt me the most. I must have hit it on the seat. I felt like I was doing crunches all day because my stomach muscles are really sore. My ankle hurts. My neck is better than I thought it would be, because I felt it stretch a long way.”

The area of wall that Gordon hit was unpadded. The revolutionary SAFER barrier is a part of every track NASCAR races on, but some tracks — Las Vegas, Lowe’s Motor Speedway and Pocono, for example — have infield walls that are nothing more than concrete. NASCAR wants to go old school this year, but not this way.

The question no one could answer after the big hit or in the days that followed was why. Why, in this age of increased safety, can any part of a wall surrounding a track be left unpadded?

“Without mincing words, last week’s incident and how Jeff hit the wall, in a word, is inexcusable,” Jeff Burton said. “I will give, and the race tracks deserve, a tremendous amount of credit to the investment they put into development and installation of the safer barriers. But the thing I’ve been saying for six or seven years is that we can never be as safe as we can be.

“We all know a wall that is shaped like that is wrong. We know that, yet it is still there. That is an example of all of us dropping the ball. We as drivers need to be willing to look at the walls and say that’s potentially a problem. The race tracks need to do it and NASCAR needs to do it. So we had three groups that, in my opinion, dropped the ball.”

Burton remembers a race in California a decade ago when driver Greg Moore hit a similar area of an infield wall and did not walk away. Driver Jeff Fuller hit an infield opening at the Kentucky Speedway last year, a wreck Burton also witnessed. Fuller walked away, but he was fortunate.

“Did anybody watch the race from Kentucky?” Burotn said. “Did anybody look at that and say, ‘Can that happen at our track?’ If it didn’t, then that’s inexcusable. And, again, it goes to me, too. I’ve seen those things, but I haven’t done anything about them. We all have to do a better job.”

Greg Biffle believes, like Burton and other drivers interviewd Friday at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, that now is the time to act.

“I think something we should do is take the Jeff Gordon crash and make it an example of it,” Biffle said. “Even though he wasn’t hurt, we should take it as serious as we did the accident in 2000 with Dale Earnhardt. I think this would have been a totally different outcome if Jeff had hit the wall on the driver’s side. A lot of places have walls like that, and they need to be fixed.”

The openings are for safety trucks to enter the track when accidents do happen, but the configuration of the ones like at Las Vegas leaves an edge that is dangerous when hit. Most accidents take the cars up the track, but when cars are going that fast, they can end up anywhere.

“To me, it’s easy to say the SAFER barriers need to be everywhere they can possibly be,” Kasey Kahne said. “Jeff was lucky to get out of that wreck, and maybe 10 years ago he doesn’t, but we don’t need to stop thinking about safety.”

Another area drivers are looking at is the grass on the infield of some tracks. Since cars actually pick up speed when they hit grass, especially if it’s damp, the resulting hits to the infield can be even worse. Asphalt actually slows cars when they’re spinning. Also, grass tends to lead to cars tipping over, a hazard NASCAR would love to avoid altogether.

“There is no reason to have grass on the inside of a race track,” Jimmie Johnson said. “It should be asphalt from wall to wall. If you look at every car that flips on a superspeedway, it’s because it gets in the grass and tips over.

“There are some areas that we need to look at. I hate the fact that there has to be such a nasty wreck and that somebody has to get out of the car and say awful things about a track to get it motivated and get it going. As drivers, sometimes that’s the only way we have to show our opinions.”

Track operators, are you listening?