Las Vegas sheds light on entertainment vs. safety in racing

LAS VEGAS — Visible from the second deck of the Neon Garage, where fans jammed observation windows and gawked down into the Sprint Cup garage, concrete walls traced along the inside of the backstretch at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

With the casino-encrusted skyline of this entertainment oasis on the horizon, as bands of drummers and stilt-walkers and show girls roved the courtyard, fans could be easily distracted from the absence of one of their hometown drivers. Injured in an accident in the season-opening Xfinity Series race at Daytona International Speedway three weeks ago, Kyle Busch faces an indefinite recovery period after colliding with another of those brutish unprotected barriers.

Amid the lavishness of this facility, outside a town where the allure of risk creates an odd dynamic between the risk-takers and those entertained by it, the contradictions were muffled by the Kiss cover band. Entertainment is the culture in Las Vegas. Safety, said 2012 Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski, must be a culture of racing. An equal co-existence remains elusive.

"I'm not sure if that culture is really there right now," Keselowski said of safety. "It just seems like it's not really a NASCAR question, it's racing in general. I think it's that the racing culture of safety right now is fairly stalled with some economic events and a lack of fatality, but that doesn't mean that racing's safe, either."

The 1.5-mile speedway in the desert was by fluke of a schedule the next venue to be scrutinized for its safety preparedness after Busch suffered a compound fracture of his right leg and a mid-foot break of his left, and Jeff Gordon collided with a hard wall on the backstretch at Atlanta Motor Speedway last week. But the race track's history poignantly underscores the point that racecar drivers, after a long, and arguably complacency-creating period of safety, have begun to get hurt or worse, again.

In the catch fence outside Turn 2, two-time Indianapolis 500-winner Dan Wheldon became the last driver in a major North American racing series to perish after his car flew into the fence during a multi-car crash in the 2011 IndyCar season finale. Weldon, 33 at the time of the crash, was pronounced dead on arrival after he was airlifted to the hospital.

In an era of vast improvements to the racecar, no NASCAR driver has died in a race crash since Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500.

NASCAR's management and labor agrees that the "entertainment sport," as Keselowski calls it, requires promotion to entice the ticket-buying public. And that requires funding for projects like the Neon Garage and the $400 million being spent on a landmark Daytona Rising project slated for debut ahead of the 2016 Daytona 500. But the pursuit of safety initiatives to protect those the ticket-buyers have paid to see requires funding also, mainly the estimated $500-per-foot to install the SAFER Barrier system that has been been credited for mitigating serious injuries in NASCAR and IndyCar since 2002. Drivers understand the calculus of soft walls versus soft seats and speedy elevators, however.

"We're not involved in those decisions, and all I can say is that if you go do that and then somebody gets hurt, and there was a way to make it safer to have possibly prevented those injuries, then you might want to rethink how you're spending your money on those things," Gordon said. "But, we've got to have people in the grandstands. We've got to have people that want to come back to the grandstands. So I understand that's important. And we all recognize how important our fans are."

The disparity in money spent on renovation instead of safety bothers some drivers, most vocally defending series champion Kevin Harvick. He sniped after a 2014 crash at Daytona that International Speedway Corp. should have allocated some of the Daytona Rising expenditure to safety upgrades.

After Busch's crash, Harvick reiterated his stance, saying he was "just a dot on a chart" after his incident. That Busch was severely injured created resonance within the industry and tracks have scurried to expedite existing safety improvement plans or formulate stopgap fixes in conjunction with NASCAR.

"I think it's a reaction from the track, unfortunately," Harvick said in February of DIS president Joie Chitwood III's pledge to swathe DIS in SAFER barriers. "I hit the same wall a little further up last year at this particular race and kind of voiced my opinion. … There was no reaction. Now there is a reaction from the race track."

Busch tweeted after Gordon's crash: "Pretty convenient to c that SAFER Barrier end just before @JeffGordonWeb pounds wall. Hope he's healthy! When will this end @NASCAR."

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Former Cup driver and current NBC Sports analyst Jeff Burton called Harvick's critique "100 percent fair" and believes tracks that cannot attain an acceptable safety standard should not host NASCAR events. There is currently no series standardized minimum safety checklist that applies to all NASCAR tracks. Assessments and recommendations are currently made in the weeks before events are held.

"It is a great point that we need these race tracks to be place people want to come to. That's what we need," Burton said. "We need beautiful facilities. We need all those things. But we also need the other, too.

"We shouldn't villainize Daytona for trying to make their place a world-class facility. That's a great thing. But it should be in concert with the SAFER barriers."

Michael Colangelo, assistant director of the University of Southern California Sports Business Institute, agreed that uniformity of minimum safety requirements would coerce promoters to be proactive.

"Until there are uniform rules put in place for all tracks, the promoters are beholden to their stakeholders to create revenue," he told USA Today Sports. "The (return on investment) is a lot higher on improving the stadium experience than adding areas of cushioned walls. This will change once big-name drivers — let's say a race where (Jimmie) Johnson, (Dale) Earnhardt (Jr.) and (Tony) Stewart can't race because of injury or won't race due to concern about the track. Because fans won't show up."

Gordon said a cyclical nature of spending also entices race teams to focus more on performance than safety, until a newfound problem arises. Criticism of a track is "easy," he said, "after the fact."

Marcus Smith, chief executive officer of LVMS parent Speedway Motorsports Inc., said his company "is always working to innovate and outdo ourselves and keep up with modern sports entertainment" and felt it had been proactive in terms of safety.

"I'd say that if I was a racecar driver, my wife would be leading a campaign to go viral on having SAFER Barriers everywhere, so I don't blame anybody for saying that," Smith said. "And we're certainly looking at arriving at what the best situation is. If you back up a few years, there just wasn't a visibility to this. There wasn't that idea that we were deficient in regards to safety."

Burton said NASCAR has long been "open-minded and willing to listen to drivers" about safety and noted innovations including improved window nettings that were implemented without an injury as catalyst.

Having seen action spurred by the latest injury, Keselowski seems more cynical.

"It's the history of the sport," he said. "It's always been that way. … It just feels unfortunate."​

Follow James on Twitter @brantjames

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