Dale Earnhardt Jr. happy with NASCAR safety initiative, wants more done

As tracks and NASCAR officials reevaluate how to better protect drivers in the wake of Kyle Busch injuring himself in a wreck in February, Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants the renewed emphasis on safety to be never-ending.

“You never can be safe enough,” Earnhardt said Friday at Martinsville Speedway. “You never can do enough to be safe and keep the competitors safe and keep the fans safe. You never can do enough, so you shouldn’t ever stop trying. But unfortunately, it takes an accident like that to wake everybody up and make things happen.

“It’s real unfortunate to have to go through that whole process to really fire this thing kind of back up and get people moving on it.”

Busch broke his right leg and left foot when he struck an unprotected concrete wall during an Xfinity Series race at Daytona International Speedway. One of NASCAR’s biggest stars, Busch is out an indefinite amount of time and isn’t expected to return until early summer.

In the aftermath, just about every NASCAR track has sought to install additional SAFER (Steel and Foam Energy Reduction) barriers. In some instances tracks have used stacks of tires to cover bare walls, including Martinsville.

“I guess their intent over time, is to get SAFER barriers where they feel like they need it,” Earnhardt said. “And until then, we’ll have these tires in those areas.”

Made of energy-absorbent materials, SAFER barriers greatly lessen the impact on a driver and decrease the likelihood of injury. But at $500 per foot, the so-called “soft walls” are expensive and many tracks are reluctant to install them on every wall a driver could strike. NASCAR only requires SAFER barriers to cover walls located in the turns.

Earnhardt lauds NASCAR’s effort to make racing safer. Shortly after Earnhardt’s father died on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, NASCAR required drivers to use a head-and-neck restraint system, and in 2004 mandated that tracks install SAFER barriers.

“NASCAR does a good job of bringing us in at Daytona every year, showing us what they have studied and what they have learned and why we are doing this, why they are asking us to change to something else and why they are bringing in something new,” Earnhardt said. “But we have only just scratched the surface on how safe the headrests can be and where we are with harnesses. We keep improving and adding and changing that.”

Earnhardt compared where NASCAR currently resides safety-wise to a footrace, saying, “We probably are only 1 foot in a 100-yard race on how good these headrests and head restraints can get.”

What he would like to see is more work done to improve safety measures inside the car -- features such as seat belts and seats, which Earnhardt says drivers mold and configure to their liking by cutting and removing padding.

“There is so much more to understand and learn and improve on these things,” Earnhardt said. “There is a lot to be understood and improved on. ... There are all kinds of things that we can improve on as far as the protocol and the steps we take to understand as drivers and understand with NASCAR what the best scenario is for us as drivers.”

More than anything Earnhardt doesn’t want complacency to set in, which he feels has happened in recent years.

“We’ve got to keep trying to improve all the time and never really let it plane out -- always keep trying to improve,” he said.