Driver’s death prompts talk of increased safety in NASCAR

The tragedy occurred in upstate New York on a small dirt track few had heard of before Saturday, but the aftereffects will be felt coast to coast.

An apparently enraged young driver, unhappy with a competitor who may have wrecked him, exited his car and sought out his antagonist. He paid little attention to the consequences of walking onto a track with cars still circling -- though under caution and at greatly reduced speeds. He paid for the decision with his life.

That same day in the Nationwide Series race at Watkins Glen International, driver J.J. Yeley walked away from safety workers who were removing his heavily damaged car and stood at the foot of traffic to express his displeasure towards Trevor Bayne, who caused Yeley’s accident.

Stewart himself has been involved in several similar instances of theatrics. Two years ago he memorably chucked his helmet at Matt Kenseth, who was going down pit road, after the two had been involved in a wreck. During his rookie 1999 season, Stewart walked onto the track at Martinsville Speedway to throw an object at Kenny Irwin Jr. and then tried to climb into Irwin’s car. Both of these actions came while the race was under a yellow flag.

And one of the more enduring moments in NASCAR lore is the Turn 3 fistfight in the 1979 Daytona 500 between Cale Yarborough and the brothers Bobby and Donnie Allison.

Be it throwing a helmet, pointing a finger, slapping a backside or some other demonstrative act, they’ve all become accepted practices. Frequently, NASCAR shows these actions as selling points to promote itself as an anything goes, raw, emotion-fueled sport.

“Look, safety first,” said Eddie Gossage, president of Texas Motor Speedway, in an interview with SB Nation. “I never understood why a driver would get out after an accident and stand on the side of the track shaking their fist when someone goes by. ... I’ve never understood it.”

If those tasked with promoting NASCAR are in agreement, common sense dictates that in the name of safety the obvious solution is to clamp down on the extracurricular happenings that take place after a driver has been wrecked. And some tracks are already doing so in the aftermath of the events that unfolded Saturday night at Canandaigua (N.Y.) Motorsports Park.

Two New York dirt tracks, Fulton Speedway and Brewerton Speedway, announced effective immediately that all drivers must stay in their cars following a wreck except in special circumstances (fire, upside down, etc.). Other tracks in Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas and Tennessee have enacted similar mandates, while other venues will be reinforcing rules they already had in place.

“Of course it was,” said Fulton general manager Cory Reed, when asked by SB Nation if the new rule was a byproduct of the events of Saturday night. “Anything like this makes you take a better look at all your policies and procedures -- hundreds of tracks across the country are going to do the same thing.”

Not everyone believes such a requirement needs to be put in place.

Already said to suffer from too many rules, some would prefer less governance. And what would constitute an appropriate penalty if a driver were to leave their car and venture onto the track?

“I don’t know how you can enforce a rule like that unless you had a robot on the track to grab the person and put them back in the car,” 2012 Sprint Cup Series champion Brad Keselowski said Tuesday during a media teleconference. “The only way you can enforce it is with a penalty system afterwards. Really at that point it’s not effective. It’s a difficult rule to try to make work.”

Then there is the question of whether capping a drivers’ exuberance works against the betterment of NASCAR. As highlighting the emotion involved is always important in a sport where drivers are chided for being robots, not speaking their minds and are often shielded by public relations-types worried about the possibility of offending a sponsor.

Humpy Wheeler, the former longtime president of Charlotte Motor Speedway, is among those who feel that the emotion exhibited when a driver is incensed is part of the fabric of the sport.

“People like to see that stuff,” Wheeler told SB Nation. “I don’t know if you want to take all the demonstrative things away, because NASCAR is lacking the way it is and people go crazy when they see that now. It’s bad enough today that we’ve corporatized [NASCAR] so badly.

“It’s like hockey. What would hockey be if they didn’t have fights? American sports fans like contact, they like drama, the demonstrative actions by athletes. You can’t defang the tiger. That’s the problem; the tiger has got to have some fangs in it to sell tickets.”

But there is something more paramount than a thicker rulebook and appeasing to an increasingly disenchanted fan base: safety.

As the preeminent motor sports sanctioning body in the United States, NASCAR has an opportunity to establish a precedence of ensuring drivers remain in their cars no matter their level of fury. Instead of seeing Stewart stomping on the track trying to hop into a moving car of a competitor, the next generation racers would grow up seeing a different kind of behavior -- one far safer for all involved.

“In any sport, those on the top rung of the ladder are emulated by those below them -- it may be good things, it may be bad things they’re emulating,” Gossage said. “There are different things you can get away with at the professional levels because it is entertainment. But there is something to be said about not doing it so that people down the [lower ranks] don’t try and emulate what you’re doing.

“You’d like to be able to let the drivers show some emotion and things like that, but nobody wants to see anything like what occurred Saturday night to be repeated at any level.”

The tragedy at Canandaigua may have come in a sprint car race, but NASCAR and its Sprint Cup Series can and should lead the way to establish protocols to make the entire sport of racing safer.