Episode 6: Born From Tragedy: The Safety Story
Introduction
If you are ever at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on a day when there is no race, you can walk down to the wall in the corners. The owners let visitors get close.
Run your hand along the wall.
For the first few feet, it feels like concrete. Cold, hard, immovable. That is the 33-inch concrete spectator wall that we talked about in Episode 2, the wall built in 1909 to absorb the energy of a car losing control. For 93 years, that wall was state of the art.
Now keep running your hand along it. About halfway down the corner, your hand will encounter something different. Black. Cooler than the concrete. Just slightly soft. Foam-backed steel.
That is the SAFER barrier. It went up in May 2002. It absorbs about 25% of the energy that would otherwise be transferred to the driver in a crash. Dr. Dean Sicking and his team at the University of Nebraska's Midwest Roadside Safety Facility built it, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway agreed to be the first track in the world to install it.
The drivers who race here today are alive because of that wall. Some of them, very directly. Some of them, statistically. All of them, in some way.
This episode is about the story of how that wall got there. And it is also the story of the device that drivers wear around their neck, the suits they wear on their body, the screen that sits above their head, and the men and women who run toward the crash when it happens.
This is the most serious episode of the season so far. Some drivers died on the way to making the sport safer. Their names should be remembered. Their deaths should be honored by what was learned. And the engineering, the deliberate, patient, sometimes-rejected, eventually-celebrated engineering that came out of that loss, has made the modern Indianapolis 500 a different sport than the one your grandparents watched.
From Episode 2 to Today
To tell this story, we have to go back to Episode 2.
In August 1909, five people died on the opening weekend of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Three of them were drivers and crew. Two of them were spectators. The founders had a choice: shut down the Speedway, or solve the problem. They chose to solve it. The 33-inch concrete spectator wall that went up in 1909 was the first permanent spectator-protection barrier at any American racetrack (Burns Stainless, 2022).
That wall worked. For decades, it protected spectators. But it had one fundamental limitation. Concrete does not give. When a race car hits a concrete wall at 200 miles per hour, the car stops in roughly its own length. All of that kinetic energy has to go somewhere. Some of it deforms the car. The rest of it travels through the driver's body. And by the 1990s, race cars were going so fast that the energy of a wall hit was beyond what the human body could survive, no matter how strong the car was.
If you listened to Episode 3, you remember the 1964 Indianapolis 500. Eddie Sachs and Dave MacDonald died in a fiery crash on lap 2. Their deaths led to the 1965 switch from gasoline to methanol, which we covered in Episode 5. That was the first major engineering response to motorsports fatalities: change the fuel.
But methanol did not save every driver. By the 1990s, drivers were still dying. Not from fire, mostly. From a different kind of injury. Specifically, from something called a basilar skull fracture.
Here is what happens in a basilar skull fracture. When a car decelerates suddenly, like in a wall hit, the driver's body is held by the seat belts. But the driver's head, which weighs about 12 pounds with a helmet, keeps moving forward at the speed the car was going. The neck stretches. And at a certain force level, the head essentially separates from the spine at the base of the skull. The injury is almost always fatal. It happens in fractions of a second.
In the 1980s and 1990s, basilar skull fractures killed driver after driver. Some of those drivers were famous. Some were not. Each one was, in retrospect, a clue. And in the mid-1980s, the people who would solve the problem started working on it.
The path from a 33-inch concrete wall in 1909 to a complete modern safety system in 2026 involves several distinct innovations. The HANS device. The SAFER barrier. Fire-resistant suits. The aeroscreen. And a medical response infrastructure that did not exist 30 years ago. Each one was a separate engineering project. Each one took years. Each one was met with resistance before it was accepted. And each one is the reason that an Indy 500 driver who walks out of Victory Lane today walks out alive.
The first one to be invented was the HANS device. It is also the most personal.
The HANS Device: An Idea Nobody Wanted
In the early 1980s, an IMSA sports car driver named Jim Downing was racing in the United States. Downing was good. He won championships. He also lost a friend.
In 1981, Patrick Jacquemart, a French-born IMSA driver, died in a crash at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. The cause of death was a basilar skull fracture (Hubbard Downing Inc., archive). Downing went home from that race shaken. He could not stop thinking about it. He started asking around. How does this keep happening? Is there a way to prevent it?
Downing happened to have a brother-in-law named Dr. Robert "Bob" Hubbard. Hubbard was a biomechanical engineering professor at Michigan State University. Before academia, he had worked for General Motors, where he designed the head of the Hybrid 3 crash test dummy, the standard dummy still used in most American crash testing today (Sports Illustrated, 2011).
So Downing called Hubbard. He described what was happening to drivers. He asked if Hubbard could help. Hubbard agreed.
The two of them sketched out their idea. The principle was simple. If you cannot stop the driver's head from moving forward in a crash, you have to limit how far it can travel relative to the body. That way, the neck never stretches to the point of separation.
The design they came up with was the Head and Neck Support device, HANS. It looks like a stiff collar that the driver wears around their shoulders, with two tethers that attach to the back of the helmet. In a crash, the tethers limit how far the head can move forward relative to the torso. The collar transfers some of the force from the head into the chest, which can absorb it. The neck never reaches the failure point.
Hubbard built the first prototype in 1985. He and Downing formed a company in 1989, Hubbard Downing Inc., to manufacture and sell the device. By 1991, the HANS device was commercially available (NBC Sports, 2019).
Almost nobody bought it.
Drivers complained that the device was uncomfortable. That it felt restrictive. That it would slow them down in some unspecified way. That getting out of the car after a crash would be harder. Some drivers actively refused to wear it. Some teams forbade their drivers from wearing it.
Throughout the 1990s, drivers in F1 and NASCAR continued to die of basilar skull fractures. Ayrton Senna, perhaps the most famous racing driver in the world, died at Imola in 1994. Several NASCAR drivers died in the same era. The HANS device, sitting in a workshop in Michigan, could have prevented many of those deaths. But the device was not mandatory anywhere, and most drivers refused to wear it (Tedium, 2021).
In Germany, at the same time, an engineer named Hubert Gramling was working on the same problem from a different angle. He had been developing airbag-based head restraint systems for Formula 1. When Gramling learned about the HANS device, he abandoned his airbag approach and joined the effort to refine HANS for F1 (Racing Archives, 2024).
The wall finally came down on February 18, 2001. Dale Earnhardt, one of the most famous race car drivers in American history, was killed on the last lap of the Daytona 500. The injury was a basilar skull fracture. Earnhardt was a 7-time NASCAR champion. He had publicly refused to wear the HANS device. His death was a national news event.
In October 2001, eight months after Earnhardt's death, NASCAR mandated the HANS device for every driver in every NASCAR race (NBC Sports, 2019). IndyCar followed shortly after. F1 made it mandatory in 2003.
Here is the statistic that explains everything. Since the HANS device became mandatory in NASCAR in 2001, zero NASCAR drivers have been killed in on-track competition. As of 2026, that is 25 consecutive years (Sports Illustrated, 2011, with updates). In IndyCar, the equivalent number is also extraordinarily small.
Hubbard died in 2019, at age 75. By that point, more than 200,000 HANS devices were in use worldwide. Today the number is over 275,000 (Racing Archives, 2024). In 2017, the Society of Automotive Engineers awarded Hubbard, Downing, and Gramling the inaugural John Melvin Motorsport Safety Award for their work.
The lesson here is not subtle. An idea can be right and rejected for 15 years. It took the death of the sport's most famous driver to force the change. The engineering was done by 1991. The acceptance came in 2001. That is how long the gap can be between the right answer and the willingness to use it.
The SAFER Barrier: Five Steel Tubes and Some Foam
While the HANS device was working its way into acceptance in the late 1990s, a different problem was being solved in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is one of the leading research labs in the country for the safety of cars hitting things. They study roadside guardrails, bridge supports, work zones, and barrier walls. Their primary federal funders are state departments of transportation across the country, because the same engineering that protects a regular driver who slides off a highway also protects a race car driver who hits a wall (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2025).
In 1998, the Indy Racing League contacted Dr. Dean Sicking, the lead engineer at the facility. They asked a specific question: can you build a wall that will absorb impact energy from race cars without bouncing them back into traffic and without being destroyed beyond repair?
Sicking and his team spent four years on the problem. They tested prototype after prototype. They used computer simulation, specifically a software package called LS-DYNA, which models how materials deform under load. They ran more than 20 full-scale vehicle crash tests, using both IndyCar open-wheel cars and NASCAR stock cars (Faller et al., 2003).
The design they arrived at is called the SAFER barrier. SAFER stands for Steel And Foam Energy Reduction. The principle is simple. The new barrier sits about 18 inches in front of the existing concrete wall. The new barrier has two parts.
Part one: five rectangular steel tubes, each 8 inches square, each 20 feet long, each 3/16 of an inch thick. The tubes are welded together vertically and horizontally to form a continuous 38.5-inch-tall steel face (Daily Downforce, 2024).
Part two: behind the steel tubes, in the gap between the steel and the original concrete wall, sits a layer of foam. Specifically, 2-inch-thick sheets of extruded, closed-cell polystyrene foam. The foam is stacked in bundles. It is held in place mechanically (Daily Downforce, 2024).
Here is what happens when a car hits the SAFER barrier. The steel face flexes inward, maybe a few inches. The foam compresses. The energy of the impact is absorbed by the deforming foam and the bending steel, instead of by the driver's body. The welds between the steel tubes are designed to break under excessive G-forces, providing additional give. And then, after the car bounces off, the barrier is repairable in hours, not weeks. The repair crew can swap out the damaged foam bundles and re-weld the broken steel joints (INDYCAR, 2017).
The SAFER barrier debuted at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May 2002, in time for that year's Indianapolis 500. IMS was the first track in the world to install it. NASCAR began installing it at their tracks the following year (Lemelson Center, 2015).
Sicking's team had a goal. They wanted to reduce the risk of serious driver injury in wall hits by 50%. In actual practice, the SAFER barrier has been measured to reduce serious injury by 75% (INDYCAR, 2017). At Indianapolis specifically, the barrier reduces peak G-forces on the driver by about 40% in a typical wall hit.
The hardest hit ever recorded at IMS into the SAFER barrier was James Hinchcliffe's crash in 2015. 125 Gs. To put that in context, a typical roller coaster generates 4 Gs at peak. A fighter pilot pulling a turn might experience 9 Gs. 125 Gs is the kind of force that, before SAFER, would almost certainly have killed the driver. Hinchcliffe was critically injured, but he survived. He was racing again the next year (INDYCAR, 2017).
Dean Sicking received the National Science and Technology Medal from President George W. Bush, in part for his work on the SAFER barrier (Wikipedia, 2026). It was the first time a barrier-system engineer received the medal. The barrier is now used at every major American oval racetrack, at most road and street courses, and in the highest-speed sections of many international racing facilities.
Five steel tubes and some foam, 18 inches of give, 75% injury reduction. That is engineering.
Nomex and the 30-Second Window
There is a third major piece of modern driver safety. It is on the driver's body the entire time they are in the car. It is the fire suit.
The story of the modern fire suit starts in 1961, in Wilmington, Delaware, at the research labs of DuPont. A chemist named Dr. Wilfred Sweeny was working on a problem nobody outside the lab knew about. He was trying to create a synthetic fiber that would not burn (DuPont historical archive).
Sweeny's work led to a polymer called meta-aramid. DuPont gave it the brand name Nomex. It is structurally similar to nylon, but the molecules are arranged so that the fabric does not melt or support a flame. When exposed to extreme heat, Nomex carbonizes, forming a protective layer of char rather than burning through (DuPont, 2024).
For decades after Nomex was introduced commercially in 1967, race drivers wore single-layer cotton or polyester suits soaked in fire-retardant chemicals. The chemicals washed out. The suits offered limited protection. By the 1970s, top drivers had begun switching to single-layer Nomex suits. They were better, but still not great.
The modern racing fire suit is multilayer. A typical IndyCar driver suit has three to five layers of Nomex woven together, with sealed seams, sealed cuffs, sealed ankles, and an integrated head sock that covers everything except the eyes. The driver also wears Nomex underwear, gloves, socks, and shoes. Every piece of fabric on the driver, from skin out, is fire-resistant (SFI Foundation, 2025).
How long does it actually protect against fire? The Society of Automotive Engineers and the SFI Foundation rate fire suits on a scale. A typical professional racing suit is rated for at least 10 seconds of direct flame exposure at 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit without the driver's skin reaching second-degree burn temperature. The top racing suits are rated for 30 seconds or more (SFI Foundation, 2025).
10 to 30 seconds does not sound like a lot. But here is the design philosophy. The fire suit is not meant to keep the driver safe forever in a fire. It is meant to give the driver enough time to exit the car, or for the safety team to extract the driver, before the heat causes serious injury. Combined with the modern fuel cell design (which is rubber, Kevlar-coated, and almost impossible to rupture except in catastrophic crashes), the goal is to make any fire survivable.
Driver fires still happen. They are rare, but they happen. When they do, the multilayer Nomex suit gives the safety team a window. 30 seconds. That is a long time when somebody's life is in your hands.
DuPont still manufactures Nomex in 2026. The company is now headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, the same city it has been in since the 1800s. The Nomex used in IndyCar racing today comes off the same production line that supplies firefighters, military aviators, and NASA astronauts (DuPont, 2024).
A material invented for industrial fire protection became the difference between a driver walking away from a fire and a driver dying in one. That is materials science.
The Aeroscreen and the Open Cockpit Problem
For most of the history of the Indianapolis 500, the cockpit was open. The driver sat in the car with their head and shoulders exposed to the air. That is what made an Indy car look like an Indy car. It is also what made the cockpit dangerous in two specific situations.
The first situation: a car hitting a fence or a wall at an angle that pitched the car upward, exposing the cockpit to direct impact. The second situation: a piece of debris from another car, flying through the air, hitting the driver's helmet.
October 16, 2011. Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The season-ending IndyCar race. Dan Wheldon, the 2011 Indianapolis 500 winner, was involved in a 15-car crash on lap 11. His car launched into the catch fencing at high speed. The cockpit struck a fence post. Wheldon died of head injuries (Wikipedia, 2026). He was 33 years old.
August 23, 2015. Pocono Raceway. Justin Wilson was racing in the late stages of an IndyCar race. The car of another driver, Sage Karam, crashed into a wall ahead of Wilson. A piece of debris, the nose cone of Karam's car, flew through the air and struck Wilson's helmet (Wikipedia, 2026). Wilson was extracted, transported to a Pennsylvania hospital, and died the following day. He was 37.
After Wilson's death, IndyCar accelerated work on cockpit head protection. Formula 1 introduced a device called the halo in 2018. The halo is a curved titanium bar that arches over the cockpit, in front of the driver's face. It is light. It is strong. But it has gaps.
IndyCar took a different approach. They worked with Red Bull Advanced Technologies in the UK to develop the aeroscreen. The aeroscreen has two parts. The first part is a titanium frame, similar in geometry to the F1 halo, mounted to the front of the chassis. The second part is a polycarbonate windscreen, similar to a fighter jet canopy, that fills in the gap. The screen has an anti-fog heating element and an anti-reflective coating on the inside (Fox News, 2019).
The IndyCar aeroscreen debuted on every car in the 2020 IndyCar season. Critically, it can withstand a load of 150 kilonewtons, which is equal to the FIA load requirement for the F1 halo. To translate: 150 kilonewtons is about 33,700 pounds of force. A 2-pound piece of debris hitting the screen at 200 mph would be stopped (Fox News, 2019).
Since the aeroscreen was introduced in 2020, there have been multiple crashes involving cars going airborne, debris flying around the track, and cars striking each other in ways that previously would have endangered the driver's head. In every one of those incidents, the aeroscreen has held. No IndyCar driver has been killed in on-track competition since Justin Wilson in 2015 (RacingNews365, 2025). The aeroscreen is a significant part of why.
There is a small ritual among some IndyCar drivers. After the aeroscreen prevented a serious injury in 2020 at Iowa, several drivers and their families openly named the device "the Wilson screen." It has never been formally adopted by IndyCar as that name. But for the people who knew Justin Wilson, who knew his family, who race because they loved him, that is what the aeroscreen is. It is the thing he asked for. Five years after he died.
The People Who Run Toward the Crash
All of this engineering, the HANS device, the SAFER barrier, the Nomex suit, the aeroscreen, only works if there are also people standing by, ready to respond when something happens.
At the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, that responsibility falls to the AMR INDYCAR Safety Team. Until 2018, it was sponsored by Holmatro, the Dutch company that has supplied the hydraulic rescue tools (the cutters and spreaders used to extract drivers) since 1991. In 2018, American Medical Response, AMR, took over as the title sponsor. Holmatro remains the official rescue tool provider (INDYCAR, 2018).
The AMR INDYCAR Safety Team has about 30 members. Most of them are physicians, nurses, paramedics, and firefighter/EMTs. The average member of the team has 20 years of experience in their specialty (INDYCAR, 2018). They are present at every IndyCar race and every IMS event.
At Indianapolis specifically, the medical infrastructure is even larger. IU Health, which is the largest healthcare system in Indiana, operates the Infield Care Center at IMS. The Care Center was fully renovated in 2023. On race day, it functions as a fully-equipped emergency department, capable of handling everything from minor cuts to cardiac arrests to serious traumatic injuries (Axios Indianapolis, 2025).
On a typical Indianapolis 500 race day, with 350,000 people in attendance, the IU Health Infield Care Center treats between 100 and 300 patients. Most of those patients are spectators, dealing with heat illness, dehydration, alcohol, slips and falls. A handful are drivers or pit crew members. Every driver who has any contact with a wall during an oval race is required to be evaluated at the Care Center before they can be released (Axios Indianapolis, 2025).
The IU Health Pit Medical team, which is separate from the AMR INDYCAR Safety Team and from the Infield Care Center, is made up of about 24 paramedics and EMTs who work pit lane during races. They are positioned between the pit wall and the grandstand. When something goes wrong in pit lane, which it does several times a season, they are the first responders (FOX 59, 2026).
In 2020, Indiana University School of Medicine launched the Motorsports Medicine Fellowship. It is a one-year post-residency program for emergency medicine physicians who want to specialize in motorsports medicine. It is the first program of its kind in the world (Indiana University School of Medicine, 2025).
The program is small. Three fellows per year. The current INDYCAR medical director, Dr. Geoff Billows, started as a volunteer at the Infield Care Center in 1995 and worked his way up to the role he holds today. Dr. Julia Vaizer, the first graduate of the fellowship, became INDYCAR's first female medical director in 2023. Dr. Liz Sullivan, the 2024-2025 fellow, has spoken about how growing up watching the Indy 500 with her family led her into emergency medicine (Indiana University School of Medicine, 2025).
If you are an Indiana high school student interested in medicine, in emergency response, in trauma care, in the place where engineering and the human body intersect, there is a fellowship literally walking distance from the Speedway that will train you to do this work. The Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Division of IU School of Medicine is the academic home of the fellowship. They work with the Indianapolis Fire Department, Indianapolis EMS, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as their primary teaching environments (Indiana University School of Medicine, 2025).
This is a career path most high school students never hear about. The people who do this work are quiet. They show up to every race. They train constantly. And every time something goes wrong, they are there, in seconds, doing the work that turns what could have been a tragedy into a story about how the system worked.
Wrap-up
Here is what I want you to take away from this episode.
Engineering is a discipline. It is the discipline of solving real problems, with measurable success criteria, using materials and methods that exist in the actual world. But more than that, engineering is a moral discipline. Every safety system we talked about today, the HANS device, the SAFER barrier, the Nomex suit, the aeroscreen, the safety team, the Infield Care Center, the Motorsports Medicine Fellowship, exists because a real person died and somebody decided to make sure it would not happen again the same way.
Patrick Jacquemart. Eddie Sachs. Dave MacDonald. Ayrton Senna. Dale Earnhardt. Dan Wheldon. Justin Wilson. They are not abstractions. They were drivers. They had families. They had favorite restaurants. They had the same kind of hopes you have. And when they died, somebody, often somebody who knew them, often somebody who was just heartbroken about it, sat down and asked: what would have to change so this does not happen again?
That is what engineering is for. Not just to make things faster, or cheaper, or more efficient. Engineering is for the deliberate, patient, sometimes-rejected work of preventing the next tragedy.
If you grew up loving the Indianapolis 500, the modern race is safer than the race your parents watched, which is safer than the race your grandparents watched, which is significantly safer than the race your great-grandparents watched in 1909. That is not by accident. That is engineering. Generations of it. Built by people whose names you mostly do not know. Built on the memory of people whose names you should learn.
This is what your chemistry class is for. This is what your physics class is for. This is what your biology class is for. The work of using what you learn in school to keep people alive who would not otherwise be alive.
Sources
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