NASCAR Drivers Want A Traveling Medical and Safety Crew

March 7, 2008

By Rebecca Gladden

Rebecca Gladden

Concerns about driver safety emerged as a hot topic following last weekend's race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway after three previous series champions - Tony Stewart, Kurt Busch, and Jeff Gordon - were shaken up in separate high-speed accidents.

Jeff Gordon's incident was the most visually shocking Sunday, and his explosive wreck has already led to plans for the installation of SAFER barriers on inner walls and wall openings at tracks like LVMS.

While Gordon's dramatic accident has understandably been the focus of attention this week, it was Tony Stewart's wreck - and the comments he made after it - that merit at least as much scrutiny, if not more.

Blowing a tire around Lap 107, Stewart sustained a wicked hit as his car careened into the wall full force, resulting in his second high-speed accident in as many days. Radioing his team after the impact, Stewart simply said, "I'm hurt."

After a few anxious moments, TV cameras showed him being helped from the car via the window and walking with assistance to a waiting vehicle which was not an ambulance.

Though FOX TV broadcasters attempted to clarify why Stewart wasn't being loaded into an ambulance, the explanation, such as it was, made little sense.

After being released from the infield care center, a still-shaken Stewart said, "That's the hardest one I've taken in a long time. It just blew a right front, I guess, and went straight in. It didn't try to turn or anything. It was a real tight part of the corner. It hit so hard it's got my lower back sore and made my legs feel about half numb. They just tingled until we got to the infield care center."

Wow.

As a former paramedic and emergency room nurse, this statement immediately caught my attention and raised a lot of serious questions in my mind. Were the first rescuers to arrive at Stewart's car emergency medical providers, or non-medical safety workers? Did Stewart say that he was having back pain with numbness and tingling in his legs -- obvious red flags for a potentially serious spinal injury? If so, why was he allowed to walk to a safety vehicle rather than being carried out on a backboard with full spine precautions? And why was he escorted to something other than an ambulance for the trip to the infield care center?

While no one but those involved in Stewart's care knows exactly what was done and why, the incident did not escape the attention of Ryan Newman, one driver who has long advocated dedicated medical and safety teams that would tour with the NASCAR circuit all season - something that has worked successfully in other racing series. "I didn't see Tony's deal, but I know he walked over to the pace car or whatever, and got in a safety vehicle instead of getting in an ambulance, and that's not cool. I don't know the entire situation, but I am aware of that and that's not the way it's supposed to be. Whether Tony said anything about it or not, I don't know."

Jeff Gordon, who took an explosive hit in Sunday's race when contact with Matt Kenseth sent him violently into the wall, also expressed frustration with the rescue workers that came to his aid. "I was in pain and agitated. I was coherent enough to know that I want to get my window net down so they know that I'm okay. But I needed a few minutes to just kind of catch my breath and let some of the pain go away before I wanted to get out, and they didn't quite grasp that one. So I was a little agitated with the safety crew. They were doing their job, but when they came to me and they asked me if I was okay, I figured putting the window net down was enough to tell them, yes, that I am, I just needed a minute. They asked me about the third time 'are you okay?' and I got mad at them. 'Yes, I'm fine, give me a minute. I've got a little bit of pain and the wind knocked out of me, so just give me a minute.'"

Jeff's comments point up the fact that rescue crews often find themselves at cross purposes with patients still reeling from the mind-numbing effects of 200+ mile per hour collisions. Many drivers want to get out of their cars as quickly as possible while others need time to collect themselves. And, as Gordon's teammate Casey Mears told me, the will to compete sometimes pushes drivers to take ill-advised risks, even after monstrous hits. "A lot depends on the situation and how bad the wreck is. I think the safety crew will usually listen to the drivers, but the thing is, we're still racing and our adrenaline is going. We want to get back on the track as soon as we can. I guess sometimes the safety crews would be a little more cautious than the drivers are."

Clearly, there have been times over the past few years when competitors found themselves on opposite sides of the fence from NASCAR, track officials, and local EMS providers regarding the adequacy of medical care on the track. "I spoke about it, I guess it was almost four years ago now, at Watkins Glen when it took them 25 seconds or whatever to come get me out of the car, and they didn't know what to do when they got there," recalls Ryan Newman. "That's not cool. There are educated people out there that fully understand what we need to have, and what we need to have done, when we're in need."

In 2004, Michael Waltrip openly criticized safety workers who took nearly 10 minutes to extricate him from his wrecked vehicle, while he hung trapped inside, hanging upside down by his safety harness after his car rolled several times and came to a rest on its roof. "I'd already flipped 10 times or five times or two times, I don't know how many times. All they had to do was flip it back over and I could get out. They were cutting bars, the whole car was on top of me. I don't know what bar they thought they were going to cut that would have alleviated the hole I was in."

In 2005, Jimmie Johnson's crew chief, Chad Knaus was livid about the medical care Johnson received after he blew a tire at high speed and hit the wall head on, his car then bursting into flames. Johnson drove back to his pit stall with the car still on fire, later admitting that he didn't remember the crash or driving back to the pits. Knaus pulled Johnson from the flaming car and noted that although his driver was "definitely dizzy" and had "definitely blacked out," he was not immediately tended to by rescuers. "There's a driver that's sitting on pit wall out there in need of an ambulance, and NASCAR doesn't even send an ambulance down there," he complained at the time. "I think it's ridiculous. We walked all the way from the 39th pit stall into the garage area before we had any medical attention whatsoever."

In 2006, Greg Biffle was also openly critical of the care he received after sustaining a concussion and dislocated shoulder during a serious crash at a tire test in Las Vegas. Biffle alleged that he was not checked out thoroughly at the scene and was inexplicably allowed to drive his private vehicle from the track after the wicked 200+ mile per hour hit, adding that he was not properly diagnosed until he returned home to North Carolina. Track representatives and EMS personnel adamantly disputed those claims.

The above are just a few examples of the life and death situations that occur frequently in a sport as dangerous as NASCAR. Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart are two of the best drivers in the business, but both described their crashes Sunday as among the very worst they'd ever endured. "I looked down and I saw where the transmission was, and it was no longer there," said Gordon, whose violent wreck left parts of his racecar strewn across the track like fallout from a bomb blast. "I'll tell you what, a few years ago, those types hits, you wouldn't be standing here."

The sanctioning body has made great strides in driver safety since the tragic death of Dale Earnhardt seven years ago, mandating the HANS device, installing SAFER barriers and transitioning to the Car of Tomorrow with its built-in safety features.

Still, though local rescue personnel do the best they can under trying circumstances, it is not the same as having specially trained medical and safety personnel who travel the circuit year-round.

Under the current rules, each track is responsible for providing the rescue workers that staff the races, who work in conjunction with NASCAR's medical liaisons. But there are simply too many variables in the knowledge, training, skills, and experience level of pre-hospital providers across the country to guarantee consistent, top quality care at every incident in every race.

The obvious next step in the evolution of NASCAR safety is the establishment of dedicated medical and safety teams with advanced specialized training in high-velocity trauma and the types of injuries that can result. These teams would need to understand the psyche of elite athletes, racecar drivers in particular, and be intimately familiar with their helmets, uniforms, other equipment, and vehicles inside and out. They would also require up-to-date knowledge of informed consent laws and the complicated medico-legal issues that vary from state to state, and would be trained to rapidly assess drivers with altered states of consciousness and determine whether they are capable of safely making the decision to refuse care.

Ideally, the drivers would become familiar with these permanent care providers and would develop a greater sense of trust in their assessments and recommendations than they have with rescuers under the current system.

Similarly, the traveling medical team would get to know each driver's personality and behavior and would be better able to assess subtle abnormalities in their cognitive status in an emergency setting.

Additionally, traveling medical and safety teams would be able to train together during the week at each track, familiarizing themselves with track details, going through drills, and practicing maneuvers that could make the difference when seconds count in a trauma emergency.

Though this concept has been bandied about for years now and is supported by nearly all of the drivers, NASCAR has steadfastly resisted it, failing to implement an obvious solution to an ongoing problem.

"I don't know why NASCAR hasn't gone to that," said Casey Mears, noting that he appreciated working with a traveling medical team in other forms of racing. "I don't know if it is a liability issue, an expense issue, or what exactly. I think NASCAR does a good job, but I can say from the driver's side, I think it would be more reassuring to have a traveling medical crew that's well aware of our cars and our safety issues."

Ryan Newman echoed Mears' sentiments, taking them a step further. "NASCAR has their medical liaisons and they have a medical staff that travels with them, but they've got a bigger staff in their catering business to feed their people. We as drivers and as teammates would prefer if NASCAR had a traveling safety team that knew our cars in and out."

Ultimately, a well-implemented traveling rescue team would benefit not just the drivers but, as Ryan Newman points out, the team members and officials that work pit road as well. "As I've always said, it would be a good idea - a great idea - to have a traveling safety team and medical team and staff that were there not just for the drivers, but for the team members, the crew members. There are as many injuries on pit road as there are with drivers on the race track."

Sadly, it took a death the magnitude of Dale Earnhardt's to spur NASCAR to action on several important safety fronts. I hate to think that it will take another tragedy - perhaps not a death, but a serious injury with long-term consequences such as burns, paralysis, or other permanent disability - before NASCAR finally brings its on-track medical incident response program into the 21st century.

The time to do so is now.

You can contact Rebecca at.. Insider Racing News



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