USA TODAY International Edition
Newman’s crash forced safety upgrades
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Ryan Newman has no memory of his spectacularly violent crash during the last lap of the 2020 Daytona 500.
He doesn’t remember the team of NASCAR first responders who helped save his life after his No. 6 Ford flipped, landed upside down and slid on the track with fire and sparks shooting out of it. He doesn’t recall firefighters extinguishing the flames, a paramedic crawling into his upside- down car to assess his condition or how the safety team rolled his car over before severing the roof, extracting him and getting him into an ambulance. But he knows exactly what happened, thanks to someone compiling a YouTube video with several angles of the crash.
“I’ve watched every angle that I could possibly watch,” Newman said last week. “The biggest problem is I don’t have any memory of my own angle, which is the ultimate angle. And that’s gone, and that will always be gone no matter how many times I watch a replay or different variations of that replay.”
He said he studies his own wrecks, as well as ones he’s not involved in, for one major reason: safety. Aided in part by his engineering degree from Purdue, he’s one of the most relentless and vocal safety advocates in the NASCAR garage.
It has been 20 years since Dale Earnhardt Sr. was killed in a wreck at the Daytona 500, and the cars are clearly much safer. That crash led to dramatic changes, just as Newman’s incident forced NASCAR to investigate what happened and respond with safety advancements and adjusted practices.
“I’ve lost some good friends,” Newman said, specifically mentioning Kenny Irwin Jr., who died in 2000 after crashing at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. Irwin was one of three drivers in NASCAR’s three national series to die that year as the result of a crash, along with Adam Petty and Tony Roper.
“We will always continue to learn from those that we lose and those that we don’t lose, as long as we keep focused on the things that we need to to increase our level of safety.”
Rescuing Ryan Newman
It took just shy of 16 minutes from the time Newman’s car stopped sliding on its roof and came to a stop to get the driver out and into an ambulance. He was taken to a nearby hospital, put in a medically induced coma and suffered what he described as a “brain bruise.” He was released from the hospital less than 48 hours after the wreck.
About 200 first responders, including firefighters and medical personnel, are on the roster at Daytona International Speedway, and they’re trained to handle a variety of incidents. And really, they have to be, especially when the iconic track is famous for its wrecks in an already inherently violent sport.
In those 16 minutes, the track services crew put out the flames and worked on the car, and the NASCAR AMR safety team – which includes paramedics, physicians and neurologists – tended to Newman, NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer Steve O’Donnell said.
The only moment Newman wasn’t being treated in that time frame was when they rolled the car over before extracting him.
“Prior to Daytona of last year, ( the safety team) met in Daytona, and they practiced a rollover procedure, which was great,” said NASCAR vice president of racing operations John Bobo. “It instills that muscle memory that allows emergency responders to respond when they need ( to).”
Bobo compared it to an orchestra, which would make Todd Marshall the conductor.
As manager of NASCAR’s track services, Marshall watched Newman’s crash unfold from race control in the tower above Daytona International Speedway. As soon as the cars began wrecking, he said he began to estimate where Newman’s car and the others would ultimately stop so the emergency response teams would know precisely where to go on the 2.5- mile track.
“What made it complex was the individual processes,” Marshall, a retired fire and rescue captain, said via email. “The crews had to handle a roll- over procedure, a vehicle extrication and driver extraction of a driver who is injured. These steps by themselves are low- frequency events throughout a race season, ( but) the on- track personnel handled each one in succession as they are trained and had a positive outcome.
“The other area that makes an incident like this a little more complex is ( the) span of control with the number of people operating on the incident scene, and the crews performed well.”
NASCAR’s track services crew prepares for moments like this through training totaling 55 hours, 41 of which are hands- on and completed annually, Marshall noted. They further prepare with track- specific training about 60 days before an event, Bobo said, and all those rehearsals attempt to anticipate a huge variety of scenarios with the help of training cars.
Responding, investigating and adapting
Established safety systems worked as designed to save Newman, but NASCAR wants to guard against complacency. Earnhardt’s death two decades ago “accelerated” NASCAR’s effort to innovate and adjust, O’Donnell said.
“It took something that should have been proactively worked on, and we learned,” Newman said of Earnhardt’s accident. “And it was like, ‘ OK, that’s it. That’s the last straw. We need to do something here.’ There’s no doubt in my mind that a lot of it is because of who it was, but that’s the way life works.”
In the years following the legendary seven- time champion’s death, NASCAR made major adjustments to its safety rules, including drivers being required to wear full- face helmets, plus a head and neck restraint called the HANS device. The governing body also eventually mandated tracks install SAFER barriers designed to absorb the energy of a crash. In 2015, NASCAR began requiring seven- or nine- point restraints on seat belts to further restrict how much gravity can pull drivers out of their seats if the car is upside down.
“The culture is what Dale Earnhardt changed,” O’Donnell said. Since Earnhardt’s death, no drivers in NASCAR’s three national series have died as the result of a crash.
“Certainly, the HANS device and SAFER barriers were huge,” O’Donnell continued. “But it’s our ability to, each and every day, talk about technology, talk about safety and continue to have people in the industry approach us about those ideas versus just talking about how to make the car go faster.”
Prior to last year’s crash, Newman already had a significant impact on NASCAR safety with what’s known as the “Newman Bar.” After multiple scary wrecks at Daytona and Talladega Superspeedway involving Newman – plus his lobbying of NASCAR – a reinforcement was added to the roll cage in 2013 to further protect the driver.
Following an investigation into the 2020 Daytona 500 last- lap crash, NASCAR’s safety enhancements included mandating two additional roll bars and a reinforced driver’s seat window net and mounting, which is designed to keep the drivers and their body parts inside the car in the event of a crash.
“We’ve really had access to incredibly powerful new tools, new sensors and new analysis tools,” said Dr. John Patalak, NASCAR senior director of safety and engineering. “We’ve been able to capture more data. It makes us smarter, we can make better decisions and we always have different ongoing research safety projects. …
“Computer modeling is a really big advancement for us and will allow us to really dive deep into certain things that we were blind to in the past, that the crash test dummies just couldn’t tell us.”
For on- track first responders, resting roof training for an upside down car has been more widespread at NASCAR’s tracks, Bobo said, and new discoveries or safety developments are detailed at a safety and racing operation summit at the beginning of each year.
“When something like this has happened, the most productive emotion is curiosity,” Bobo said. “So we have been as curious as possible about everything that we’ve done.
“How can we do it better?”