Black Sunday – Rebuttal to Marvin Lovern
I’ve said my piece on restrictor plate
racing.
Lord knows, a lot of you know that I have.
I don’t particularly enjoy authoring pieces on this subject, because it is
tiresome. However, it is also a story that never ends, and pieces still get
published than manage to push the envelope on the issue.
At InsiderRacing.com, regular contributor
Marvin Lovern has authored a piece – "Black Sunday – The Sequel?" –
that manages to push the envelope, and in so doing insult quite a few people. It
is this aspect that requires yet another rebuttal to an endless, tiresome
debate.
Lovern opens his piece with what has
become a tautology – at the 2001 Daytona 500 the 5th place car landed on the
26th place car. He then asserts that "the same conditions combined to kill
Dale Earnhardt."
"NASCAR still hasn’t improved any of
the conditions that combined to kill Dale Earnhardt, Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin,
and Tony Roper. In fact, NASCAR may be resisting important safety improvements
such as crush boxes….and consistent standards for driver helmets and head
restraint systems. Nevertheless……on July 7th Winston Cup racing will return
to Daytona……under the same conditions that produced the tragedy in February
– restrictor plates, unstable aerodynamics, no mandate for the use of head
restraints, no crushable front end components, no soft walls, no series
dedicated medical team – the list goes on and on."
And Lovern goes on and on – "The high
speed artificial competition produced by NASCAR’s superspeedway racing formula
is exciting for fans and draws lost of TV viewers who believe this is really
racing….."
Now we stop here to ponder this last
portion – TV viewers who believe this is really racing. When the lead is
changing hands back and forth on the racetrack, that is RACING – the cars and
drivers are RACING each other for the win. What, then, is Marvin Lovern trying
to get away with by insulting fans and TV viewers because they enjoy seeing real
competitive racing?
"Black Sunday’s tragedy reaffirmed
that the senseless death it produces is very, very real."
The senseless death NASCAR’s superspeedway
formula produces…… Now obviously Marvin Lovern has forgotten the rash of
short track deaths that have occurred this year, and he has conveniently also
forgotten that the three driver deaths of 2000 occurred on a one mile short
track and on a 1.5 miler running Craftsman Trucks. All of these are unrelated to
NASCAR’s superspeedway formula.
Lovern’s list of what Daytona will race
with sounds ominous on paper – until you get to the nitty-gritty of putting
serious thought into them –
– Unstable aerodynamics – There was no
instability with the cars at Daytona other than produced by heavy crosswinds
during the 500, and all that did was hurt front down force on some cars trapped
mid pack, so what is he talking about here?
– No mandate for use of head restraints –
Ward Burton’s concussion with a head restraint showed an oversold aspect of such
devices, and peer-review criticism of Barry Myers’ whiplash-alone report on
Earnhardt’s death further undermined the case for such devices.
– No crushable front end components –
Lovern forgets the rash of injuries in the years before the recent hardening of
front clips, and also ignores data cited by Rusty Wallace from Ford tests that
contradict the too-rigid argument.
– No soft walls – They do not work in real
life.
– No series dedicated medical team – As if
there has ever been any problem with the in-house track medical teams already in
place.
Lovern then resorts to slander when he
asserts, "If safety improvements are not made and death returns to
Daytona…..then everyone from the Florida Governor’s office in Tallahassee who
grants them special support, to the sponsors who gain product exposure, to the
fans who support them……will have the same blood on their hands as does
NASCAR.
Excuse me, Mr. Lovern, but there is no
blood on my hands, on Jeb Bush’s hands, on NASCAR’s hands, nor on the hands of
those who attend races and watch them on television. NASCAR has not implemented
"safety improvements" because time has dulled the need for such. If
drivers don’t wear head restraints, it is because their own experience in
crashes undermines much of the argument in their favor – Jeff Gordon for one
survived a Texas hit far worse than his hit in the Winston at Charlotte, and the
HANS collar sure wasn’t missed at Texas then. There is absolutely nothing
artificial about sustained side by side racing and lead changing for the
entirety of a 500-mile race – on the contrary, actual artificiality comes when
the field is strung out and there are only a few cars able to win the race –
Pocono for one had some excellent dicing for the lead, but only three cars raced
for the lead all day where there ought to have been seventeen or more leaders
and 49 or more lead changes.
The blood on hands argument insults
literally everyone involved in the sport and should never be tolerated. Mr.
Lovern, you lied about the sport in your piece, and I’m calling you on it.
Mike Snow of Speedway Scene doesn’t get it
any better, though he at least respects people a lot more, in his June 29 piece
on failed aero testing at Talladega in April. He repeats a call for lower
banking at Daytona and Talladega, and again ignores that the speed issue would
not go away with lower banking, as the flatter Michigan Int’l Speedway and other
such tracks have been flirting with restrictor plates for years and recent
testing at Chicagoland Speedway saw speeds in the 182 range and 197 on the
straights, speeds five or more seconds beyond what such a track needs to be
running for stock cars. Snow also forgets crashes such as Tom Carey at Dover in
the Trucks where concrete walls were punched open – crashes that denote most
graphically the need for plates and aero anchors to drastically slow the cars
down.
Just how effective panic has become is
shown by Joe Nemechek – Mike Snow reported that he will start using a
head-restraint system because of his Dover crash – never mind that he suffered
no head injury there in his crash during testing. Again, a car restricted in
power and aero to speeds several seconds a lap slower than what he was turning
would work a lot better than head-restraints.