Gary Nelson, NASCAR managing director of research and development, supervises the center. His team uses a variety of means, including computer simulations and crash test dummies, in an endless quest to make a dangerous sport safer. One of your projects is a five-year plan to design "the car of the future." What does that involve? We've focused on the driver's space and what protects the driver: restraint systems, the seat, and the space around him. The [the size of a regulation NASCAR] car got a bit bigger. It looks the same, but just a few inches, from the driver's perspective, is a big deal. We fill that space with crushable material that absorbs some energy. If you think about passenger cars today, they have an air bag that acts as a pillow. There is no way to have an air bag that does what we need at racing speeds. But the theory of absorbing energy of the impact … would be a very good goal. Instead of a pillow between the driver and the wheel, we put protection [outside the cockpit] on the side, front, and back of the car. So when [the car] hits something, we're able to lengthen the time between [impact] and the car coming to a complete stop. It happens in an instant. We're talking about milliseconds. But if we can double the length of that instant, those extra milliseconds make a tremendous difference to what the driver feels.
I think its nice that there is someone who is trying to help the drivers when they crash because lots of people die because of this NASCAR racing (i like nascar).
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