Watkins Glen – A Siren’s Song

If Sonoma is the wicked witch of the west, with her short track tendencies and her hot temper attitude. Then Watkins Glen is the evil witch of the east, with her high speeds and dangerous tempting of drivers to drive in just a little deeper go just a little faster. After a days delay due to rain, she rewarded patience and collected those who gave into her sirens song.

After coming close enough to see the checkers wave. After having fate rip the flag from his hands. Marcos Ambrose finally silenced the reminiscing of his close calls when he took the checkers in very convincing style. Ambrose held off a hard charging Brad Keselowski in the final turns to bring home his first Sprint Cup win.

[media-credit name=”Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images for NASCAR” align=”alignright” width=”234″][/media-credit]Although the checkers flew with the yellow for two serious wrecks on the final lap both occurred behind the leaders leaving Ambrose, Keselowski and Kyle Busch to bring them all to the finish line wide open and going for broke.

As the wind caught the checkered flag, a sickening stillness spread on the breeze as the carnage of the wreck involving David Ragan and David Reutimann became apparent via the big screen on the front stretch. Reutimann was air born. He hit two walls and the car appeared to disintegrate around him. Ragan hit an oblique wall dead head on after contact from Boris Said and then bounced into Reutimann sending him airborne when they both hit the outside Armco retaining wall.

This was the third serious wreck of the day. The first saw Kurt Busch lose his brakes entering turn 5 and go head on into the tire barrier. “I had a big problem getting into the braking zones today — just rear brakes locking up,” Busch said after the crash. “I had to crank eight rounds of front brake into our [car] just to survive. All that does is generate brake heat, and I blew out the left-front tire.

“It was a bummer of a day and not anything that we expected. It must have been something with the brake package. Whatever Keselowski found at Road Atlanta [during his Aug. 3 testing accident], I had a problem with today.”

The second of the day was Denny Hamlin’s crash in turn 1 on lap 65. Hamlin’s car lost its brakes and hit a tire barrier and guard rail head on at 60mph moving a fence backwards almost 2 feet whose posts were set in concrete.

“This was just terrifying,” Hamlin said, “because you know there’s nothing you can do, and you’re heading straight for the fence. It’s the [most scared] I’ve been, by far.”

“You’re obviously traveling fast. This is obviously the fastest road course,” said David Ragan after his crash, “It’s crazy, though, in this day and age to not have SAFER barriers and a little better design. That guardrail and all has probably been here since the 1900s when this race track was built. It’s kind of absurd. There are dirt tracks that have better SAFER barriers and wall systems.”

Reutimann who was struck in the leg by a piece of flying debris that cut through his uniform, when he became air borne and struck both inside and outside armco guard rails. “This is one of the bigger hits I would say, but it’s part of the gig,” Reutimann said. “You sign up to do this stuff, every once in a while you’re going to hit something. As fast as we’re going, you hit stuff pretty hard. I’m good and will be ready for Michigan next week. I’m thinking where I hit would probably be a good place for SAFER barriers. So, maybe we should look at that next time we come back. Overall, I’m OK and ready to get out of here.”

Jeff Gordon was a victim in the same spot in the track last year and was fortunate enough to walk away from a very nasty crash. Although Gordon finished 13^th and was not involved in the wreck, he certainly sympathized with the drivers who were involved.

“You can’t have walls like that. You’re going to find those places eventually, so they’ve got to fix them. And unfortunately, this one has been found before. And we’ve seen what can happen, and we’re very fortunate we don’t have any injuries coming from that, because obviously it could have been much worse. But anytime you’re in a race car and you’re trying to go fast, accidents are going to happen. And when they do, you have to make sure they have a clear path for cars to exit the race track. In this situation, they’ve got a wall that [produces] not only a big impact, but puts it right back out into traffic.” Stated the four time champion.

In fairness not every driver voiced a concern about the barriers. Race winner Marcos Ambrose had a different perspective on the tracks barriers coming from a road course back ground. “I don’t drive around this place looking at any one spot saying, ‘Ooh, that looks nasty to me.’ I think they’ve done great with what they’ve got,” he said. “If you don’t have a guardrail off Turn 2, you end up going down a bank, so that’s not good, either. So I think the track itself is fine. I think we just have to keep working on safety. All the drivers walked away. I’ve got no complaints about this place. I think it’s a safe race track. We’re just driving these cars flat out, and it creates problems. … I think the track is a classic road-racing circuit. You don’t want to make it too sterile. You’ve got to have bumps and lumps and change of camber and roughness and all that kind of stuff that makes it what it is.”

But the facts remain that one more time NASCAR has taken a wait and see attitude. It took the death of J.D. McDuffie here to create the bus stop chicane to insure that the heavy high powered stock cars could make the turn safely. One would think with the history of serious career and life threatening injuries that Watkins Glen has that NASCAR would want to take a proactive stance and say Ok we need you to look into making changes here and here. But that is simply not the case.

Nascar will review the black box information from all the wrecked cars and see if the G Spikes were high enough to warrant S.A.F.E.R. barriers being placed in the trouble spots. G Spikes occur at impact and are a measurement of the gravitational force that the driver sustains. It takes a certain level for the sanctioning body to mandate the S.A.F.E.R. barrier technology be placed in the area by the track.

For the third week in a row, there were safety concerns for drivers. For the third week in a row lives were at risk. Again it calls into question the Driver Safety First Initative of NASCAR. Obviously this car has incredible safety systems. But is that enough?

If the technology exists to make the enviroment safer to race in why on earth would you not have it in place? If driver safety first is your first priority, so much so that unlike other series, Sprint Cup does not race in the wet, why would you not insist that the technology be in place at tracks where they race?

Spokesman for Watkins Glen International Speedway, Ryan Lake stated post race, “Driver safety is certainly our No. 1 concern, and I think our past shows that we’re more than willing to do what’s necessary — such as two years ago, when we made those changes with the extended runoffs and SAFER barriers,” track spokesman Ryan Lake said. “After this race, we’ll certainly speak with NASCAR, and if they come back and say we need to make changes, we’re certainly going to do that.” The key words here are “if they come back and say we need to make changes, we’re certainly going to do that.”

Why after the crashes we saw this weekend would you need NASCAR to tell you that you have a problem? It’s apparent that there is a problem and it’s not the first time the problem has shown itself. Why? Because S.A.F.E.R. barriers are expensive. Very expensive. It’s in the neighborhood of $500 a foot. That isn’t the only problem. Dr. Dean Sicking, creator of S.A.F.E.R. barriers said, “The truth is, along with the expense, there wasn’t enough steel tubing in the world to do it. [put safer barriers on every wall]

“We would have used it all and still come up short. We had to select the areas where a crash was most likely to occur.”

The S.A.F.E.R. barrier is comprised of hollow rectangular tubes in front of foam padding, which is in front of the concrete walls. S.A.F.E.R. stands for Steel and Foam Energy Reduction.

NASCAR is aware of the risks. “Obviously, we want to have the S.A.F.E.R. walls in the areas where we have the most risk,” NASCAR CEO Brian France said, “I know we’re always looking at it, and every track is a little bit different.

“Some are road courses, so you can’t just say every wall. It may not be practical or it may not be necessary. But clearly in areas of high risk, we have to do better.”

Now, the restrictions are understandable. The outside factors are very apparent. But the fact remains that if NASCAR is going to put driver’s safety first then as a whole the sport should be proactive in the area of driver safety not reactive. It should not take losing a driver or having one seriously injured before we take the steps to prevent it. This is the second consecutive year that this turn and area of the track has been shown to be unsafe. Yet we wait and see what happens. The time is here for NASCAR to say this is what happens and if you want to keep this date, you will fix this area of the track.

The sky was growing dark over the track and teams were hurriedly preparing to finally go home. Some breathed sighs of relief. Some celebrated a victory over the evil witch. Some just sighed happy to be returning home with limited pain. As the thunder rumbled far off more than one looked over their shoulder towards the chicane where the destruction had occurred and wondered out loud, how close did we really come? The slowly falling rain drops seemed to whisper the answer they all knew as they hit the tops of metal trailers and sent a universal shutter down the spines of all present.

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Congratulations to Kurt Busch and the Ruby Tuesdays/Discount Tire team on their victory in the NNS this weekend. Kudos to Jimmie Johnson on racing to win a race in a series, where he had nothing to gain or lose.

Congratulations to Marcos Ambrose and his Stanley Tools team. It was awesome to see the King and Todd Parrot back in victory lane. It’s been too long. It was also a great thing to watch Marcos finally put to bed all the almosts.

That said, to all the competitors in all the series thanks for giving us everything you have to give, you are our heroes. Most importantly, thanks to all the families who shared their loved ones with us so we could cheer our favorite driver and favorite teams. You are the true heroes of the sport and we are forever in your debt.