Seat Safety

With a greater sense of urgency than ever before when it comes to safety, many of stock car racing’s top drivers have learned how important it is to have proper head and neck supports on their race seats.

A seat that lacks correctly installed head and neck devices can mean the difference between a driver walking away from a crash or being injured. The supports are simple, too. Just padded “arms” coming from the rear neck area of the seat. They’re designed to limit the movement of a driver’s head during an accident.

While much attention has been focused on the HANS or Hutchens head-and-neck restraint systems, those devices are only designed to prevent forward head motion. That’s where the head and neck supports on the seats come into play, because they’re designed to reduce the lateral head and neck motion.

“There is not going to be one magic pill to fix all of the issues that are facing us all right now,” says Brian Butler, president of Butler Built Motorsports Equipment. “This is a very detail-oriented business. You are not going to be able to buy one product and be able to say everything is fixed. It just doesn’t work that way unfortunately.

“You absolutely have to use the HANS or the Hutchens device, but those alone aren’t going to protect you in every situation. You have to have that proper lateral head support that the seat provides. You have to use both.”

While racing will always have its inherent risks, many in the garage area have seen how important having a safe seat with the proper supports can be.

“The evolution of the seat has made a lot of progress over many years, not just this season,” says NASCAR President Mike Helton. “I think with Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin’s accidents last year, we learned that the cockpit area was very critical. With the knowledge we’ve gained from what’s happened, we know the cockpit can do different things. We’ve met with engineers and manufacturers to help all of us understand things better and be able to explain to the competitors the importance of a safe seat.

“The seat has to be as unique as the driver himself because, naturally, a seat that would fit a Michael Waltrip wouldn’t fit somebody smaller like Mark Martin. There are a lot of good technologies out there that are available, plus the ones that we don’t know about yet that will make it safer than the last year and a half. The effort is to create an environment that satisfies the broadest range of possible wrecks a car can have.

“You can’t plan for every single incident because you have to be ready for anything. The head and neck supports on the seat help distribute the weight at a strong part of the body that can be used to brace drivers with. Limiting the movement of the head while protecting visibility, all of that has to converge together for everything to work right.”

Developments

When it comes to seat safety in NASCAR’s top three divisions—Winston Cup, Busch, and the Truck Series—three seat manufacturers have the lion’s share of the market. In addition to Butler, seats are also available from Richardson Racing Products and The Joie of Seating, a small business started by two-time Busch Series champion Randy LaJoie.

All three manufacturers have different ideas for how to build the safest seat, but all three share the goal of making the office of drivers as safe as possible.

“I’ve been a crash dummy all my life in race cars, and I feel like I’ve avoided some injuries because of the way I build my seats,” LaJoie says. “We’ve learned that the seats need to be stronger and have all the proper head and rib supports.”

Steve Richardson, president of Richardson Racing Products, says many factors go into the construction of a safe seat.

“We’ve seen that not only do drivers need protection in their rib areas, but they really need something up higher around the shoulders and head area,” Richardson says. “You need to have your head supports mounted securely for one thing. That way, if a driver hits the wall sideways, not only is the center part of the torso supported, but the upper body is protected too. Not only is that a lot safer, but the seat itself will withstand a lot more shock. Everything has to work as a unit. We still have a lot more to learn. I don’t care what seat manufacturer you’re talking to. We’re really just scratching the surface.”

Richardson says the major challenge is that every crash is unique with the different speeds, angles, and the weight of the drivers.

“There are so many different things to take into account,” he says. “A good example of that is a smaller driver like Jeff Gordon or a John Andretti who simply doesn’t have the same body mass that Jimmy Spencer has. A 180-mph crash into a wall for a Gordon or Andretti is going to be a lot less severe than Jimmy Spencer at that same speed. There’s a lot more stress on the bigger drivers.”

Butler, a 20-year veteran of the safety industry, is glad most drivers are taking a more serious look at making their seats as safe as possible.

“There have always been head injuries in racing, but in the last two years it’s gone up to a whole new level,” Butler says. “It’s taken everybody a long time to realize that there are solutions available for these problems. It comes with a cost, but it’s not really about the money. Some of the things inside the car have changed, so getting in and out of the cars isn’t as simple as it used to be. One thing we’ve really tried to focus on is the upper body support.

“We feel like we’ve proven with our history in the sport that the overall seat design is not flawed because the seat does restrain the body properly from the torso down. From all the test data we’ve had access to, it’s proven that the core product of the seats is good and it absolutely works. We do have a solution right now available to anybody in any series of racing in this country.”

The seat, while it can seem complex in its intricacies, is rather simple in construction. Butler, for example, uses .090-inch aluminum, and then double-layers that in critical areas for extra support. The seats weigh around 28 pounds or a little more, depending on the amount of support and padding each driver opts for.

“We want to create a linear, consistent motion when it comes to the deceleration of the body,” Butler says. “We’ve got to be careful of not losing control over any one area of the body in relation to others. The seat is designed to absorb energy and distribute it in a controlled manner, so that’s what we’re trying to do with the upper-body supports. It absolutely works because these things have been tested; it’s not just a theory that’s been put out for people to test in real-life situations. These systems have been tested in lab conditions.”

A Call For Action

In the inaugural Winston Cup race at Kansas City last year, driver Dale Jarrett was in a nasty wreck when the driver’s side of his No. 88 Ford made heavy contact with the wall. Jarrett, who at the time was not using head and neck seat supports, was briefly knocked out as a result of his helmet cracking on a support bar inside the car.

“I can honestly tell you that Dale Jarrett is extremely lucky, because that could have been very bad if it had been a slightly different direction of a hit,” Butler says.

The day after the wreck, Butler was at Jarrett’s shop installing the head supports, and had a waiting list with several other top drivers who wanted the devices in their cars before the tour returned to action in Charlotte.

“I’ve had wrecks before, obviously, but I’ve never really hit that hard on the left side before,” Jarrett says. “What I know now just shows me that I have to pay a lot more attention to the seats that go in my cars. I’ve got a new seat in my car now and I wouldn’t get back in the car without the supports on that seat. To be quite honest, I didn’t like the supports at first because they impaired my vision a little when I was racing.”

Jarrett’s team owner Robert Yates says the Kansas City wreck was a serious wake-up call.

“We’ve been working on safety for more than 30 years, but more than ever we need to speed these things up to keep the drivers safer,” Yates says. “Now we’re using scientific means, and I grew up learning through the school of hard knocks.”

Driver Involvement

A handful of the top drivers in NASCAR have been working hard behind the scenes to make their seat as safe as possible. Winston Cup champion Jeff Gordon is one of those drivers who tries to stress to others not to take the safety capabilities of a seat for granted.

“My seat has a lot of the same concepts that Randy LaJoie uses,” Gordon says.

“I have a very modified seat that’s built by Butler, but it’s not really a Butler seat. That’s because the guys on my team back at the shop completely modify the headrests and everything. We’ve learned a lot and I feel very good about my seat, even though I know there are still areas we can make it better. We’re learning those types of things through all the different crash data and information from NASCAR as to how to make it safer.”

Jeff Burton, driver of the No. 99 Citgo Ford, has spent a lot of his spare time working with Butler to make the seating structure safer.

“What I’ve tried to do is build more lateral head support into my seat,” Burton says. “The seats from the past just didn’t have enough support for the left and right head areas. What we’d had on the right was not sufficient side restraint, so essentially what we’ve tried to do is make that better in addition to adding more strength to the shoulder area to help provide more control of the torso. I do have that protection on the left side, but you are limited with that because the driver still has to be able to get in and out of the car. If you look at my seats, you’ll see what I feel like are huge strides in that area.”