Bob Barnard Track Engineering

So NASCAR has "reacted quickly" to the death of Kevin Ward Jr. and made a new rule for drivers to stay in their car unless in dire emergency. Not so quickly as some local oval series, but they have reacted.

That is the point. They react to an incident and stick a band aid on it. How about being pro-active? Blind Freddy could see that sooner or later a driver wandering around on a hot race track seeking payback was going to be hit. It took a death to fix it. But what if Tony Stewart had not been the driver to hit Kevin? Suppose it was just another Saturday night local racer? Would we even have heard about it? We kill or maim people every week on tracks in the US, and unless someone well known is involved who cares? Ray Dunlap said on NASCAR Race Hub in the week that 25 people are killed a year, and I bet that is just in the NASCAR related races he knows about. What about kart tracks, private testing, track days etc?

I saw the reaction of one track after a 12 year old boy on a kart was decapitated for the lack of a barrier. They immediately installed a fence, straw bales, tires and plastic barriers. They said they could not do it beforehand as they could not predict where the accident would happen! There are tracks built all around the world where the basis of their design is the prediction of accidents and measures put in place to prevent or ameliorate them. We have over 100 years of knowledge and experience and now computer simulation to assist us, so why do we still have tracks that do not install the basic systems or do so incorrectly?

It took a big wreck at Watkins Glen for drivers to ask for improvements. Let's see how fast NASCAR reacts to that.