82
The late Dan
Gurney (left),
who survived
one of motor
racing’s most
dangerous eras,
faced risks that
today’s drivers
don’t. But Gary
Nelson (below)
knows more
work needs to
be done.late racer Dan Gurney said as he watched track
workers cover the body of a teenage boy his car
had just hit and killed. At the 1960 Dutch Grand
Prix at Zandvoort, Gurney’s BRM P48 suffered
brake failure at 140 mph, ran off the track and
through a barbed-wire fence, and overturned,
breaking Gurney’s arm and injuring several oth-
er spectators.
Three years later, journalist Robert Daley pub-
lished a book chronicling one of the most dan-
gerous eras in racing, using “The Cruel Sport”
as its title. In fact, “Motor racing is the cruelest
sport,” Daley wrote. “It is also the most brilliant,
because it is man wrestling with his demons on
the edge of the infinite.”
That was 56 years ago. With massive advanc-
es in technology, things are certainly better now
than in Daley’s time: Of the 16 drivers in the
first Formula 1 Grand Prix he covered—Monaco,
1958—half eventually died behind the wheel.
But there’s no argument that racing remains
a very cruel sport. Although fatalities at the top
professional level are rare, deaths still occur in
troubling numbers: According to Automobile
research, in the three-month period of March,
April, and May 2019, at least a dozen racers died,
most of them in amateur events.
So what to do? Individual drivers can, of
course, stop racing, but motorsports will contin-
ue. After all, the first recorded motorsports fatal-
ity occurred nearly 120 years ago.
The only other option: Although racing is saf-
er than ever, it needs to be made safer still.“ONE OF THE
AMBULANCES
WAS A HEARSE,
WITH AN
OXYGEN TANK
AND A GURNEY.
THAT WAS IT.”
DURING THE
WORST OF IT,
“ONE IN SEVEN
DRIVERS WAS
KILLED EVERY
YEAR.”Gary Nelson is the manager of Action Express, the
two-car IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship
Prototype team that has won four season champion-
ships since its 2014 debut. But long before that, Nelson,
as crew chief, won the NASCAR Winston Cup title in
1983 with Bobby Allison and the Daytona 500 in 1982
with Allison and in 1986 with Geoff Bodine.
NASCAR hired Nelson in 1991 to be the director
of Winston Cup, a job he held for 10 years before he
became vice president of research and development in- That was the year Dale Earnhardt was killed in the
Daytona 500, and everything changed. Nelson’s primary
responsibility was to build the NASCAR R&D Center in
Concord, North Carolina, and investigate ways to make
racing safer, which he did until he left in 2007.
There are, Nelson says, “primarily three real threats to
the driver. The first is a high g-load,” which happens when
the driver comes to a sudden stop or takes a hard hit.
“This is not the sort of thing we typically see in a traffic
accident. [Longtime motorsports medical authority] Dr.
Terry Trammell once said that the type of serious injury a
“THIS
SPORT,”
IS A
CRUEL