I guess I'm going to be the odd man out here.
I spent a lot of weekends strapping my best pal into a Competition Eliminator dragster that runs 180 MPH. And there were a l-o-t of tracks we ran on that were pretty eye-opening at the other end. Columbus being a very good example. We had trouble stopping the car at that track, even with carbon/carbon brakes. So I can only imagine what trying to pull one down from 300+ MPH must have been like. And go figure, that is no longer a national event venue. When it got to the point the sheriff's dept. was closing the county road at the end of the track and opening gates to allow cars to go across the road, if necessary, the handwriting was on the wall.
NHRA has done a pretty good job of demanding newer and more efficient safety equipment for the drivers and cars. Better firesuits, arm restraints, neck braces, HANS devices, upgraded harness systems have all helped protect the drivers. Even though these rules meant higher expenses for the drivers, we never complained about it. That was my best pal in that car and his life just wasn't worth risking. Even if we rented a track for testing, he still wore every last bit of his safety equipment. And it's not unusual to see others that figure a t-shirt and shorts are good enough at a test session.
But when is someone going to start holding NHRA's feet to the fire on track safety? Yes, there is a highway just beyond the treeline at Englishtown and race cars couldn't be allowed onto the highway. So the plan to keep errant 300+ MPH cars off the highway was to put concrete barriers and concrete-filled metal poles in place?!? PUH-leeze!
We ran at the NHRA Division 3 points meet at Martin, MI a few years back. The right lane was interesting. About 300 feet beyond the finish line, there was a pothole in the right lane. About 14-16 inches in diameter and 4-5 inches deep. How did they handle the problem? They put an orange traffic cone in the hole, that's how. Anybody feel up to dodging potholes at 170+ MPH?
At the U.S Nationals one year, we were running the first or second round of Comp and a pal from the Detroit area put out a couple of rods at about 1,200 feet. He came off the track, waving his arms and trying to get his helmet off. He started yelling that they needed to close the track as he knew he had oiled his lane. The NHRA offical (who shall remain nameless) on the scene replied by saying, "It will be OK, don't worry." Sure, it was going to be OK, because we were risking a super-star's car and/or life, it was just going to be some nameless/faceless Comp racer.
Another year at Martin, a pal from Peoria had just made a pass in an A/EA. He had some problems and coasted to a stop about 50 feet short of the finish line. Now it was dark, but his NHRA-required tailight was clearly burning. We were on our way down the return road to get Brian, so we were close enough to see this happening. The driver hit his harness release and started to come up out of the roll cage. At about that time, you could hear the next pair of cars leaving the starting line!!!! Another shining example of NHRA's safety practices.
See the type of mentalities we have calling the shots at NHRA? I could write a book, believe me.
So when I see spectators grumping about moves to keep drivers alive, I have to wonder.
The Worsham car and the Force cars have been fitted with chute release cables tied to the body burst panels. If the car bangs a blower and pops the burst panel off the body, the chutes are both released. It takes the process completely out of the driver's hands and ensures the chutes are released, even if the body folds down on the driver, preventing him from getting to the levers. Does this sound like teams that want to run unnecessary risks?
Allen Johnson, the man that tunes the Shumacher T/F car, and also builds a lot of components for the fuel and alcohol motors, was heavily in favor of shortening the tracks. He was aware, just as Jim Head mentioned, that the majority of catastrophe takes place in the back half and by shortening that distance, his driver was going to be at less risk. Of course this meant a lot of his customers wouldn't be blowing their stuff up any more, but he was still behind the move.
The NHRA-mandated rev limiters were not going to allow the cars to ever break the standing MPH record anyway, so why not eliminate a large part of the risk and make everyone breathe a little easier?
The Kalitta car was in a bad position. The intake was blown apart and was pulling engine oil into the intake tract. When a motor has compression, an air source and a fuel source, what happens? They build enough heat in the clutch that it is not a simple matter of simply stepping on the pedal to disengage the clutch. Air gap disappears in the pack when they get that hot. The body leaving the car got the chutes out, but not cleanly and the fire took care of what was left. The body coming off gave up all the downforce, so the brakes were ineffective and you could clearly see the car bouncing into the pea gravel. There were front tire skid marks all the way through the shut-down area, so it was clear Scott was doing everything he could to end the nightmare.
What ended the nightmare (and a friend's life), were concrete and metal barriers. And a boom supporting a TV camera. And we're supposed to just move on, because racing is risky business? Bob Vandergriff said it well, when he said the only danger not present in the E-Town shutdown area was a lake full of hungry sharks.
We always ran Weddle cars, until Ed lost his life to cancer. Since McKinney Corp. Race Cars is right here in town, we started working closely with Murf. I even went to work for Murf for a short time. Murf's cars are great. Our cars were always good for at least one Best Engineered award, before it was time for a new one. I used to watch Murf drive himself berserk, trying to find better ways to protect his customers' lives. It's time everyone in the sport started approaching things the same way.
The nitro shortage is very real. NHRA has stopped allowing the Monday test sessions at the national event venues, to conserve nitro. The problem is down to virtually all nitro being supplied from China. And, in an effort to look good before the world's cameras, China has shut down huge chunks of its industry until after the Olympics. They are hoping the smog will clear, so the world won't see how bad it is there. As soon as the Olympics are over, we'll have to wait for the backlogs to start filling the supply chains and things should return to normal. Things seemed to blow up over nitro, because this shortage took place at about the same time that Homeland Security issued its new regulations.
