Sunday’s Food City 500 returns to the concrete of Bristol Motor Speedway and Ryan Preece, driver of the No. 41 HaasTooling.com Ford Mustang Dark Horse for Stewart-Haas Racing, is poised for a breakthrough performance on the half-mile, high-banked oval in Eastern Tennessee.
How SAFER Barriers Came To Help NASCAR Drivers Survive The Big One
So-called soft walls have been absorbing energy in NASCAR, IndyCar crashes for nearly two decades.
By Al Pearce Icon SportswireGetty Images
For decades, the main consideration when it came to walls and fencing at NASCAR tracks was fan, and not driver, safety.
Perhaps inexplicably, NASCAR and its member tracks seemed satisfied with concrete walls until the death of Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500.
IndyCar led the march toward the creation of life-saving “soft walls.” In May of 1998, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway experimented with PEDS (Polyethylene Energy Dissipation System)