The soft wall was a good call

INDIANAPOLIS -- Safety is just taken for granted in NASCAR these days, mostly because of all the improvements made since Dale Earnhardt's death in 2001.

But two things -- the unexpected death last week of Steve Peterson, NASCAR's safety guru, and racing this weekend at Indianapolis Motor Speedway -- offer reminders of just how much things have changed.

While checking all the NASCAR crashes in recent years, there's something quite remarkable -- since Earnhardt's death, no driver has been killed in any of NASCAR's three national touring series.

And one big reason for that success story -- soft walls.

They have been racing here at Indy since 1909, and many wild and crazy things have happened over the years -- a lot of dramatic, horrific crashes, and too many deaths. So it's fitting that Indianapolis Motor Speedway was the birthplace of soft walls, one of racing's most amazing safety achievements.

Soft walls are a revolutionary concept in a sport where not so long ago -- and even still at some major tracks -- steel guardrails ruled.

The leap to soft walls by Tony George, the president at Indy, and Indy Racing League officials 10 years ago, triggered a revolution in racing safety that has kept many drivers from death or serious injury. They made the decision to install the then-novel 3-foot-thick steel and Styrofoam safety barriers on a test section of the outside walls.

Now every NASCAR track, except the two road courses, is surrounded by soft walls, which can diminish G-force impact in a crash by as much as 40 percent.

At first, there was some reluctance to George's move, some disbelief that something seemingly so simple -- a sandwich of Styrofoam -- could work, much less work as well as it has.

Leo Mehl, the Goodyear racing boss for so many years and the director of the IRL from 1996 through 1999, has seen more than his share of deaths and disasters in the sport around the world.

"The theory of soft walls had been around since I could remember," Mehl said. "I can remember lots of attempts to put foam on walls.

"Smokey Yunick designed a track so the walls would give -- the whole thing would move back."

But nothing quite worked. Until now.

"My personal opinion was it's better to try something than not take the risk at all," Mehl said. "Somebody has to start this process.

"The bottom line is when you do anything different in racing, you take a great big risk of making the situation worse. Tony George took a big risk to let us put that wall in."

Engineers at Wayne State University did the studies and discovered that the system could reduce the deadly energy "spike" by 30 to 40 Gs. It is that spike that typically kills.

One of the big surprises is that the system works so well that it's very rare for repairs to be needed during a race.

The soft walls here got their first major test not during the Indy 500 but in the 1998 IROC race.

Arie Luyendyk got caught up in a crash and hit the wall hard, totally shredding the soft-wall barrier.

"I was with Tony watching the race, and he hit at a terrible angle -- an angle that often results in injury," Mehl said.

But Luyendyk escaped serious injury. And A. J. Foyt was very impressed, saying Luyendyk was lucky to be alive.

"We knew the barrier had taken at least 30 or 40 Gs off the hit," Mehl said. "But as we cleaned up the debris, it became obvious we needed to get some more help. And the most experienced guys we knew in the business for guardrails, attenuators and such, were at the University of Nebraska."

At that point, Nebraska's Dean Sicking became involved, and the soft-wall barrier was improved. NASCAR officials quickly signed on to the program, and crash-testing began in earnest in 2000.

By May 2002, George was willing to make the full move to soft walls all the way around this track, with what is now called the SAFER barrier.

"I spent most of my professional life in racing tires -- so understand I'm not a safety expert -- but I can't image any other safety feature that made so much difference," Mehl said.

"Racing will never be completely safe, but it's safer now than it has been in my lifetime."

E-mail Mike Mulhern at mmulhern(at)wsjournal.com.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)