On Sunday afternoon in mid-July, Bob and Martha Labonte had finished lunch and taken their usual seats in front of the television. They were watching the Winston Cup event in Chicago.
There was a wreck. A race car, hidden in fire and smoke and unidentifiable, skidded down the track. There was movement in the center of an orange ball of flames. Bobby Labonte crawled through the window, touched the ground running through a cloud of smoke, staggered, and fell.
"Not a good sight," Bob recounts. "It was a relief to see the window net come down. I look for that when there is a wreck. When I saw the window net fall, I knew that Bobby was conscious before I could see him climbing through the window." Bob, as well as others concerned with racing safety, would like to see NASCAR improve its safety capability, for example by increasing its engineering staff.
It is difficult for parents to watch their offspring wrapped in fire and smoke such as in the Labonte crash. These people look at NASCAR and see dozens of lawyers and marketing people, plus scores of public relations representatives, but the engineering list is short. And, rightly so, they may question the reliability of the engineers NASCAR already has on the payroll.
You look around and soon discover nearly every race team in Winston Cup has at least one or two engineers, and some multi-car teams can easily count six or more. It seems to me it would lend credibility to NASCAR if they had a similar bank of engineering talent. If NASCAR has such engineering capability and staffing, the public relations staff needs a paddling for not getting this information out to the public.
Aircraft companies, for example, have fuel cells with break-away fittings that, in some cases, stop fires almost immediately. Wouldn't a qualified NASCAR engineer try to develop such a fitting? It might cost a little more, but would it not be worth a little extra to save a life?
Dale Jarrett, Ken Schrader, Ryan Newman, and Bobby Labonte have all had to bail out of flaming cars since late-spring this year. Gary Nelson, who carries the title of NASCAR's safety specialist, works out of NASCAR's research and development center, located in Concord, North Carolina. This is NASCAR's version of the Pentagon-no one goes in, and not much information comes out.
After the Chicago wreck, a NASCAR spokesman claimed Nelson's priority list had extinguishing fires ranked No. 1 and roof escape hatches ranked No. 2.
Labonte's own team discovered a metal tube sticking about 3 inches out of the fuel cell, which sheared off when he wrecked. This allowed the tank, filled to 22 gallons just a few laps earlier, to spray gas and catch fire. The team replaced the metal piece with additional tubing that is more flexible. Labonte's boys connected a second hose to the fire extinguisher that sits behind the driver seat. One hose runs to the driver area where the driver can position the nozzle to spray himself. The other hose runs into the trunk.