Ryan Newman’s injuries could have been a lot worse. The NASCAR driver could have died during the final lap of the Daytona 500 in February, when his No. 6 Ford Mustang went spinning, flipping and flaming through the air.
Instead, Newman was released from the hospital a few days later with what he called a “bruised brain” and returned to racing along with the sport amid the coronavirus pandemic in May. He said he felt “completely normal” a few weeks after the wreck.
“It doesn’t get enough credit,” Daytona 500 and Sunday’s Homestead race winner Denny Hamlin said. “We all need to realize that Newman’s crash was the best, right? No long-term injuries or anything like that. Bumps and bruises here and there, but essentially everything did its job.”
NASCAR’s safety and R&D team didn’t do much sitting around and patting themselves on the back amid Newman’s miraculous recovery, however. While still at the track, the team launched an investigation into how to further improve car safety, and announced those updates in early May.
“While stock-car racing is inherently dangerous, our safety experts continue to make significant strides in this area,” NASCAR SVP of innovation and racing development John Probst said Monday. “Our work in safety is never complete. We view that as an ongoing project for us, and for all our competitors for that matter.”
The crash investigation process included taking photos outside and inside the vehicles involved in the wreck. In this case, it was Newman’s No. 6 car and Corey LaJoie’s No. 32 car, which hit Newman on the driver’s side after he spun out.
The safety team also looked at the drivers’ restraint systems, as well as information on the incident data recorders and high-speed video cameras, which sit inside the drivers’ compartments, to collect crash data. Those findings were then added to NASCAR’s collective crash database and evaluated, NASCAR director of safety engineering John Patalak said.
“All of this information that was found from those inspections was compared to the available data and video sources in order to create a step-by-step understanding of the crash sequence,” Patalak said.
NASCAR returned on Wednesday. After the No. 6 driver survived the crash at the Daytona 500, he will be behind the wheel at Darlington. He’s only missed three races because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Monday — before the sport heads to the next superspeedway race at Talladega this weekend — officials elaborated on the safety changes, which are primarily aimed at slowing cars down and reducing the likelihood of tandem drafting, the racing maneuver that caused Newman’s car to spin out from contact to his rear bumper by Ryan Blaney.
“Slowing the cars down surely should and would help from an aero liftoff standpoint,” Patalak said. “I would say our findings from the Ryan Newman crash, his liftoff was not due to an aero event but from him getting into the wall.”
“The idea there is that reducing the speeds of the car, slowing them down, we would expect speeds under the 200 mph barrier here,” Patalak continued. “So from that standpoint, slowing the cars down, keep them from having as violent wrecks.”
Specifically, here’s what NASCAR is updating for Sunday, and why:
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New rule: Elimination of aero ducts at superspeedway tracks.
What it is: The aero ducts are essentially aerodynamic holes that allow air to flow out of the vehicle in front of the tires.
Why the change: Probst said this change helps mitigate the likelihood that cars will be able to tandem draft, which is considered a dangerous move in which cars run directly behind one another nose-to-tail to increase speed, although the maneuver is still often implemented.
