Walk through the Winston Cup garage area and you'll see firsthand what drivers are doing with safety. Seats with elaborate head restraints. Additional netting to restrict head movement. Improved padding.
Wallace says, however, that he fears some drivers may be going overboard with safety equipment, to the point that they may have trouble getting out of the car quickly in case of a fire. "Some of the guys have so much stuff that it looks like you'd have to lower them into the cars to get them inside," he says.
What Next?Drivers know they can't worry about the risks of their job, and dwell on the recent deaths, if they expect to do well each race. All they can do is prepare the best they know how and hope for the best.
"We all know it can happen, and it's really tough when it happens to someone as close as Blaise and I were," Kimmel says. "To see something like that happen, it makes you hug your kids more. But as far as what we do in a race car, you strap in and you can't really think about that stuff.
"Hopefully you've done your homework and God is going to be with you all day."
Kimmel says that, like fans, he gives a sigh of relief when he sees a driver walk away from a crash. "I guess with all of the things that's happened, the first thing you do is you want to see some movement inside the car. If he's got a broken leg, that's OK. He can walk later. The initial thing is fearing the worst."
Wallace was asked what he would tell a fan who worries about his safety.
"I think if they saw what I had in the car now, they'd feel a little more comfortable," Wallace says. "I want to be secure in the car, but I also want to be mobile. You have to balance them both."
Burton discusses his outlook: "I'm a pilot, also. When I hop in my airplane, I don't think I'm cheating death. When I hop in my race car, I don't think I'm cheating death. I may die in my race car. I may die in my street car. I may die in my sleep. I don't know how I'm going to die when I die. I don't fear getting killed in my race car. I don't want to be injured in my race car and have a debilitating injury."
Burton believes he has done all he can to protect himself.
"The only thing I can tell the fans is there is a tremendous amount of effort being put into making racing safer," Burton says. "We want to make it to where you can have a bad wreck and be back at the track racing the next week. We've seen some really violent wrecks with obviously bad results. Those wrecks have shown us we need to be doing something different. There's a tremendous effort in the garage because of what we've seen with seat belts and head-and-neck devices. This is a different garage than it was a year ago at this time.
"In the fatalities, those drivers weren't taking advantage of all the safety improvements we have today. That's not to say we're not going to have more fatalities in racing, but things are certainly safer and people are really looking at the safety products we have available to us today more than ever. That's all I can say because I can't sit here and say people are not going to get hurt or injured, or something even worse. We can only promise there's a tremendous effort and desire to prevent it from happening again."
Drivers know that future safety developments will take time. In the meantime, they have a job to do.
"There's no doubt we need to make these cars more crushable," says Jeff Gordon, driver of the DuPont Chevrolet. "We need to find ways to soften these walls up so they absorb the impact yet don't make it worse. But it's not going to happen right away. Anybody that gets out there knows that. I know it and I'm still planning on getting out there. I'm sorry if you don't agree with that or understand that, but it's just the mentality of a race car driver."
Only the start of a new season will tell if times will return to normal, if people can finally put the deaths behind them.