This accounting does not include career-ending and life-changing injuries. Since 2001, racing luminaries like Ken Buchel, Andy White, Bob Akin, Jason Leffler and Herbert Glenn Jr., as well as many others, also lost their lives to these barriers.
That’s two fatalities a year directly related to inferior walls. From 1970 through 2000, a database of driver deaths in motorsports documented approximately 70 drivers in open-wheel, sports car, stock, sprint, modified and dragster racing who all died after hitting concrete, tires, guardrails or fences.
For decades, innovation in crash barriers, which make up roughly a quarter of the racing-safety equation, only went so far as Armco guardrails of steel that pierced cars like knives and were eventually replaced or cushioned by used-tires that themselves scattered, created rebounds into traffic, allowed cars to submarine and, even after just a minor bump, caused flip-overs.
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