Welcome to the special ordering page for CRASH! A price of $25 is being offered to racing industry members. It reflects the discount publishers typically give to retail booksellers and includes free shipping. The BUY NOW button follows below along with excerpts.
by Jonathan Ingram
with Dr. Robert Hubbard and Jim Downing
The 20-year struggle by Dr. Robert Hubbard and Jim Downing to gain universal acceptance for their life-saving HANS Device—now in use by over 275,000 competitors worldwide—is an amazing tale of family, genius, perseverance, tragedy and triumph. It tells how the world’s leading auto racing series shouldered the task of saving their driving heroes—and a sport.
‘A great read for those interested in racing and racing safety.’
– Art Garner, author of Black Noon
‘Ingram sifts stories from racing’s extensive canon to replay racing’s worst nightmares through drivers’ eyes.’
– Jim Mullen, co-author of Brian Redman: Daring Drivers, Deadly Tracks
‘The racing world was likely saved from extinction.’
– Steve Olvey, author of Rapid Response.
$25 includes shipping.
by Jonathan Ingram with Dr. Robert Hubbard and Jim Downing
CRASH! is the story behind the saga of the HANS Device. It touches every form of auto racing on the planet and several subjects close to all of us: political intrigue and struggle; scientific discovery; tragedy; triumph; and matters of conscience. Above all, there’s a lot of racing and information that even the most die-hard fan will find new and compelling.
Hubbard and brother-in-law Downing eventually helped four of the world’s major auto racing series resolve an epidemic of death that killed 12 drivers in a seven-year span, nine by basal skull fractures. Numerous others were being killed by the same injury in lesser known professional series as well as weekend warriors.
The 20-year struggle by Hubbard and Downing to gain universal acceptance for their life-saving device—now in use by over 275,000 competitors worldwide—is an amazing tale of family, genius, perseverance, tragedy and triumph. It tells how the world’s leading auto racing series shouldered the task of saving their driving heroes—and a sport
EXCERPTS
The Intimidator – Chapter 1
It takes some looking to find the statue of Dale Earnhardt at the Daytona International Speedway. Standing in front of administrative buildings, it’s far off the main pathways leading to the massive array of grandstands.
For a man who made his mark in the thundering cauldron of stock car racing, by location and composition the memorial is deceptively quiet. Reminiscent of the works by the great sculptor Rodin, the bronze Earnhardt holds the massive Harley Earl trophy with one arm and the other has a fist raised high in the air, celebrating after a long-sought win in the Daytona 500 in 1998. The eyes smiling slyly above a wide grin and bristly mustache aren’t directed toward the sky or the horizon in a typical winner’s pose. An all-seeing gaze looks where his fans would be, taking them in as much as they might be looking up at him, all reveling in the moment of triumph.
That was Earnhardt, a big man who stood out but appreciated his fans as much as they admired his unalloyed commitment to prevailing against the odds. For all of Earnhardt’s outsized image as “The Intimidator” and his wealth minted from success and fame, he retained his roots. He understood the physically and psychologically demanding work behind the wheel symbolized the struggles faced by stock car racing fans, most of them work-a-day Americans, the same as Earnhardt’s family. He also understood the sport he loved had always needed champions willing to help grow its popularity by being accessible.
What brings the statue to life is the tension created by the one arm cradling the heavy trophy to his side and the other lifted in exultation high above his head. The stance has his upper body, shoulders and neck slightly bowed—Rodin-like—as if to exemplify the strength and combative persistence needed by a 20th Century racing hero, standing his ground, testing himself against the resistance, propelled by an almost super-human inner drive to rise to the challenges posed by the sport and its inherent risks.
There is a universal humbleness to the slightly stooped posture, which is also a reminder of the sad ending. The odds finally won at the Daytona 500 in 2001, when a typically aggressive Earnhardt was killed on the final lap by what seemed to be an uneventful meeting with the wall during a battle for third place. A few degrees in either direction in the angle of impact and the No. 3 car’s momentum would have been absorbed by an ongoing series of spins …
Downing’s Awakening – Chapter 2
A five-time road racing champion, Jim Downing first met Dale Earnhardt in the NASCAR hauler at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2000, where he was talking about the HANS Device to a longtime acquaintance, Mike Helton, soon to be named the NASCAR president.
After the deaths of Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin from basal skull fractures earlier that year during two separate NASCAR events at the New Hampshire International Speedway, Helton was very interested in talking with Downing about motor racing’s first head and neck restraint. Since NASCAR closely controlled all aspects of its racing series, any safety device used by drivers had to have the sanctioning body’s approval.
Downing had met the future NASCAR president in the early 1980s while building Mazda RX-7 pace cars at his Downing/Atlanta race shop for the Atlanta International Raceway, where Helton was the general manager and in charge of securing the cars to fulfill a sponsorship deal financed by Mazda. Not long after that deal with Downing, Helton left his post at the Atlanta track to take a similar job at the giant oval in Talladega, Alabama, before moving to Daytona Beach as an employee at NASCAR’s Florida headquarters. Tall and broad with imposing eyes beneath a thick mane of dark hair, Helton had gradually worked his way up the NASCAR hierarchy.
“I knew Jim Downing from his racing days when he was the Mazda driver, when he was up in the wine country of Georgia and I was down in the moonshine country,” recalled Helton. “I knew Jim Downing as a racer. Atlanta Raceway had a deal one year with Mazda. We had Mazda RX-7 pace cars and they were souped-up by Downing. Bob Hubbard came along with that process of knowing Jim and in that time (after the driver deaths) we were getting more aggressive in talking with folks like that.”
Earnhardt wanted nothing to do with the HANS Device at the Indy test. “Dale came through the door of the NASCAR hauler, just walked right in while I was talking to Mike about the HANS,” said Downing of his first meeting with the driver known as “The Intimidator.”
“They had a little desk in there and he threw his leg over the corner of it and kind of sat down. He looked at us with that bristly mustache and a grin as if to say, ‘What are you guys talking about?’ The message was pretty clear. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the HANS and didn’t want Mike listening to what I had to say. Earnhardt sitting there pretty much brought the discussion with Mike to an end.”
Twenty years prior to meeting Earnhardt, Downing’s own experience with a head injury resulted in a fortunate outcome—given the dangerous nature of his crash on a track in Canada in 1980. On a sweltering August day at the Mosport Park circuit near Toronto, Downing was sweating profusely while competing in the Molson 1000. On board a Mazda RX-7 entered by the Racing Beat factory team, the tall, slender Downing was running first in the GTU class with the other Racing Beat Mazda immediately behind him in second place. Its driver, John Morton, was looking for a way past.
The 10-turn Mosport track undulates around glacially carved hills. Because of the almost non-stop high speeds, it’s a thrilling place to watch a race. On this summer day, fans, many of them camping overnight in tents on the various overlooks, had come out to see the World Championship of Makes race sanctioned by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). The race also paid points for the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) and the combined entry featured some of the world’s best sports car teams and drivers.
This included numerous Porsche 935 Turbos, relatively crude silhouette cars. These ill-handling tube-frame machines were wicked fast due to turbocharged engines producing gobs of torque that hit the drive train like a thunderstorm. They were driven by sports car stars such as Brian Redman and John Fitzpatrick and by moonlighting Indy car drivers Rick Mears, Danny Ongais and Johnny Rutherford. Twenty-year-old future star John Paul, Jr. was another of those behind the wheel of the Porsches. The fearless and fast German, Walter Rohrl, co-drove a Lancia Turbo in search of FIA points and renowned team owner Bob Tullius of Group 44 was competing in a Triumph TR-8 for British Leyland.
In IMSA’s standard endurance racing formula, the GTU class for cars with smaller engines consisted of Mazdas, Datsun 240Zs and Porsche 911 Carreras. While they relied more on momentum and less on horsepower, the GTUs were scary to drive at Mosport, too, because of their nimble cornering speeds—–and the constant swarm of faster Porsche Turbos.
During this particular summer, the heat and humidity were not unusual for August. But to find more speed, the engineer at the Racing Beat factory team had closed off most of the airflow into the cockpit. Downing had worked his way into the graces of Mazda’s racing management due to his quickness, reliability and a low-key confidence that fit in well with the Japanese. He intended to sustain his career momentum and decided not to protest the lack of air coming through the cockpit.
Already a championship contender aboard Mazda RX-3s in the RS series of IMSA for compact cars running on radial street tires, he was looking to advance to the big leagues of American sports car racing and into the GTU category where Mazda was a major player. But he lost so much perspiration during the race’s first hour in the muggy cockpit that he passed out behind the wheel while heading into Turn Two—–a fast, sweeping, left-hand corner.
For the first and only time in his career, the crash briefly knocked Downing unconscious. Events became fuzzy as he was taken to the track medical center. It was like a dream—tumult and noise all around him, but everything distant and one step removed, the roar of the cars on the nearby track now a distant hum. The memory lingered after an overnight stay in the hospital.
“I just got lucky and the car turned backwards,” recalled Downing. “It was a concrete wall with a hill behind it. The impact cracked and broke the wall. The car was so bad, they left it in Canada after stripping a few pieces off of it.”
Downing realized a head-on crash could have been deadly. (Five years later, Manfred Winkelhock was killed by a head-on meeting with the wall in Turn 2 on board a Porsche 962C during a World Endurance Championship race.) Downing began to think about the number of head and neck injuries happening in racing at the time. Like so many racers, he shrugged off his crash as part of the business. Then, the following spring, Downing learned that a frontal impact by fellow GTU racer Patrick Jacquemart at the end of the back straight of the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course during a test was indeed fatal. The cause of death was a basal skull fracture.
Downing’s first reaction to his own near miss typified the ambitious racer’s point of view, whether it was Formula 1, Indy cars, sports cars, stock cars, drag racing or rallying. ‘It won’t happen to me again,’ he thought. But when Jacquemart’s crash occurred, the realization sunk in with Downing that it might have been his funeral. He then asked himself once again: ‘Why can’t something be done about head injuries?’
The Death of Senna – Chapter 8
Those in racing who were closer to Senna tended to present him in a more nuanced light, which included Dr. Sidney Watkins, the head of neurosurgery at the London Hospital. The medical officer of Formula 1 and a former professor of neurosurgery at the State University of New York at Syracuse, he was known as Professor Watkins or “Prof” Watkins. He became a friend and confidant of the Brazilian driver, who arrived not long after Watkins first took responsibility for ensuring a prompt medical response to drivers involved in crashes. (This was at the behest of Formula 1’s driving businessman Ecclestone, who perhaps foresaw the need for greater safety and the politically risky prospect of drivers getting killed during live TV coverage he was so instrumental in organizing.)
Watkins, in his book Life at the Limit, Triumph and Tragedy in Formula One, recalls the time when Senna made a visit to the Loretto School, Scotland’s oldest boarding school located near Edinburgh. Watkins’ stepson Matthew Amato was enrolled at Loretto and had requested a visit from Senna in a letter that was hand-delivered by Watkins. The professor further encouraged Senna to come to Loretto and then enjoy some fishing with him in the River Tweed.
There was great interest in Formula 1 at Loretto. Jim Clark, the two-time World Champion, had attended the school and the Clark family’s farm was located in the rolling hills of the nearby Borders district. Senna’s visit came prior to the start of the 1991 season and shortly after he had won his second World Championship—– the one he had clinched by intentionally taking Prost off the track in Japan. After walking through the memorial to Clark in the chapel, Senna addressed the high school enrollment during the mandatory bi-weekly Saturday evening lecture, which usually featured speakers from industry or medicine.
“We thought Ayrton would be a good one to have,” recalled Amato in an interview 20 years later. He was 15 at the time he requested the visit by having his stepfather deliver the letter to Senna. “He gave a really good talk about what it takes to be a Formula 1 driver and about Jim Clark. He said he liked the fact that Jim Clark always had a smile.”
The bulk of the lecture was a question and answer session and the first question came from a future barrister. It was about rival Prost and what he thought of him? “Wow, first question!” said Senna, who went on to praise his rival in some detail.
“It was the etiquette that we had to address the lecturer as ‘Sir’ before we asked a question,” said Amato. “About three or four questions in, he said, ‘You don’t have to call me sir.’ The next question he got, the guy called him ‘Ayrton,’ and he said, ‘Yes, like that.’ By the end everyone was calling him Ayrton. He answered a lot of good questions about the pressures of the job and even about sponsorship by tobacco. At the end he said he was impressed by the caliber of the questions that were asked. It went on for a couple of hours.”
“He talked about how he had to come over and how he had to work hard,” continued Amato. “He gave advice with an ear to a young audience about how important it was to work hard to achieve a goal. He talked about sacrifice and being away from his estate in Brazil and his boats and water skiing. He gave very good, thoughtful answers to the questions, which I think is not a given for many sports people. He was very comfortable talking about his faith in God. It was more from the perspective of answering questions about the danger of his job and was he scared of losing his life? He said he had faith and that helped.”
The Bishop of Truro, at the school to conduct the Sunday service the following day, was at the gathering and later in the day had a heart-to-heart conversation with Senna before the driver returned to Portugal for testing. “On Sunday the Bishop of Truro began his sermon,” wrote Watkins, “with the confession that he had been spiritually and verbally outclassed as a preacher by Ayrton Senna.”
____________
After Clark’s death there was concern the sport would be outlawed due to the obvious lack of safety represented by the fatal crash of its greatest driver. But the absence of scale when it came to motor racing’s popularity and the lack of broad commercial involvement precluded any great backlash. The tragedy was significant enough to warrant a same day announcement in America on the Wide World of Sports by host Jim McKay, who was the broadcaster for the Indy 500 during Clark’s assaults on the Speedway. But regular live TV coverage of Formula 1 was still years away. That, too, helped keep in check the tide of public criticism about the dangers of motor racing.
The death of Senna, whose estate was valued by some as high as $400 million, occurred on the opposite end of the spectrum when commercialization was in full bloom. His crash in a car powered by Renault and sponsored by the Rothmans International tobacco company was beamed into homes, bars, motor homes and public houses globally, the same medium that had made the Brazilian driver a leading light in the daily march of sports heroes across TV screens everywhere.
Testy Testing – Chapter 15
During testing on track with Newman/Haas Racing drivers in the winter of 2000, the Model II HANS created during the sled tests in Germany by Mercedes-Benz evolved significantly. What was learned in CART soon became the basis for HANS models used for all reclining drivers, including those in F1, as well as drivers in upright seats such as stock cars.
The testing at Sebring International Raceway was relatively easier for Michael Andretti, whose beefy upper body meant the new, smaller Model II yoke did not put undue pressure on his collarbones. It was not the same for the taller, lankier Fittipaldi.
Oddly enough, this fit Dr. Steve Olvey’s strategy. He thought working with Fittipaldi the best choice, in part, because he was regarded as a prima donna. “I reasoned that if I got the pickiest driver that we had, one that can’t tolerate any unnecessary discomfort in the car, or any changes and he accepted it, we could then convince the other ones,” said Olvey. “I was close friends with Emerson Fittipaldi, so Emerson helped me talk his nephew into trying the HANS during the winter testing period. At first, he absolutely hated it, but agreed to continue using it.”
From the outset, Fittipaldi recognized that the HANS Model II wasn’t ready for the reclining seat in his Indy car, no matter how much testing it might have undergone in sled tests.
“It’s not easy when you go around a road course in a Champ Car,” recalled Fittipaldi of the Sebring tests. “Those cars had almost 1,000 horsepower and you’re flying over curbs and just running all the time and surfaces that are uneven. It’s a different story than going around on an oval where you don’t have the bumps like at Sebring. On an oval, you’re not braking or accelerating, you’re at a constant speed all the time. You’re only turning one way. On a road course, you’re aggressively turning right and left, sometimes when you’re turning, you’re flying over a curb.”
HANS inventor Dr. Robert Hubbard understood the problem. "Because of the complex shape and movements of shoulders, the only way to get an acceptable fit was to make HANS prototypes for the drivers, then try to find fault with it," said Hubbard. "Then, we would have to change the shape and try again. This cut-and-try shape development would be mostly the responsibility of Jim Downing and fabricator Jerry Lambert at Jim Downing’s racing composites shop in Atlanta. We also would have to search out and try several padding materials. The cooperation and patience of the Newman/Haas team was essential to arriving at shapes that the CART drivers could accept."
“Sometimes we stayed several days in Sebring and we spent a shitload of money,” said Fittipaldi. “There were times that it was so bad I couldn’t drive the car on the limit. So, the laps I was doing we had to wipe out. We were burning tires, we were burning fuel only to develop Dr. Hubbard’s stuff.”
The team calculated that testing at Sebring cost $1,500 per lap—–including supplementary expenses like plane tickets and transporting the cars. With the testing of various HANS iterations remaining so long at the top of the clipboard list of priorities, tempers occasionally flared. “At a certain point the conversation started to heat up,” said Fittipaldi. “I think Dr. Hubbard was expecting me to say something. For me life is very black and white. So, there were times when I got out of the car and said, ‘Hey dude, the thing is shit.’ Even if he spent four weeks, or months or whatever, I was worried about my safety and the safety of my colleagues. I was worried for what he was trying to implement and I wanted to guide him in the right way and not be political and not tell him something wrongly.”
For his part, Hubbard had a great deal of experience working with young, idealistic people. The patience developed by years as a college professor in addition to his dedication to the task at hand helped sustain Hubbard on his typically even keel. At one point, Fittipaldi looked at the HANS inventor and said, “Dr. Hubbard, you don’t like me very much do you?” Hubbard declined to answer that day at Sebring. “I thought about it and when I saw Christian the next day,” recalled Hubbard, “I told him, ‘Christian, I like you well enough to save your life.’”
___________
All the chipping away eventually led to the day in Fontana when HANS inventor Hubbard came to a jolting realization that his dream for safer racing was about to be realized. At the finish of the season-ending 500-mile race held one year after Greg Moore’s fatal crash, despite a multitude of blown engines that crashed or sidelined all but six cars, no driver was seriously injured.
Fittingly, in every sense of the word, Christian Fittipaldi, the one driver who had done the most work to develop the HANS Device, was the man standing in Victory Lane that day.
The Fateful 500 – Chapter 20
When Michael Waltrip came to a meeting in Dale Earnhardt’s motorhome on the Friday night before the Daytona 500 in 2001, he was expecting a tongue lashing from the team owner. Newly hired for the season to drive for Dale Earnhardt Incorporated, Waltrip had missed a shift in his qualifying race on Thursday and lost an opportunity to win it. But instead of a lecture from the seven-time champion, Waltrip got a pleasant surprise.
“We’re gonna win this race Sunday,” said Earnhardt enthusiastically. According to Waltrip’s memoir “In the Blink of an Eye,” Earnhardt believed that by working together, he and the two DEI drivers could be the top three finishers, although the conversation fell short of designating an actual winner, just cooperation.
Earnhardt’s confidence somewhat baffled Waltrip, but the team owner was keenly aware of a new development: the Chevy engines at his DEI team were producing more horsepower on restrictor plate tracks than any of the other teams.
The long, high-banked and fast circuits at Daytona and Talladega were known as “restrictor plate” tracks because NASCAR required a plate with four bores underneath the four-barrel carburetors to choke the engines and keep speeds in check. Otherwise, cars tended to lift off in crashes and present the harrowing prospect of a car flying into the grandstands. Teams had tried to find ways around the plates ever since they were first introduced in 1988, the season after Bobby Allison’s flying Buick nearly landed in the grandstands at Talladega.
Once the plates were installed and average lap speeds dropped well below 200 mph, even the slightest addition of horsepower resulted in a decisive advantage. Teams tried all manner of ways to bypass the restricted opening of the plates to get more air into engines.
NASCAR had its hands full with teams piping air into engines through various clever methods, including solenoid valves connected to holes lower in the engine block used in qualifying and cylinder heads with visually undetectable leaks that produced a mysterious whistling. These cylinder heads were used by Sterling Marlin’s Morgan-McClure Motorsports team in back-to-back Daytona 500 wins in 1994-1995 before NASCAR began testing more closely for outside air induction.
During the 1994 season, meanwhile, illegal inserts at the throat of the manifold were successfully used by Junior Johnson that went undetected during his team’s summertime victories at Daytona and Talladega in cars driven by Jimmy Spencer. The manifolds were later confiscated after Johnson finally made good on his threats to leave the sport.
To prevent this problem, NASCAR introduced a round, snub-nosed block during engine inspections. The rules also called for the manifolds sitting beneath the carburetors to have a flat floor. With the carburetor removed, the snub-nosed block was inserted during NASCAR inspection into the throat of the manifold. The block was long enough to reach the floor directly under the carburetor opening. The idea was to prevent any adjustments at the entrance of the manifold or inside the manifold, which sat just below the carburetors and plates.
But for several years, the team of Richard Childress had begun taking the rule literally—– that the floor of the manifold had to be flat only where the inserted block met the bottom. While retaining enough flat floor for any visual inspection, the engine builders at Childress began carving grooves into the remaining bottom portion of the manifold to better direct the air and fuel mixture from the carburetor to each cylinder. In effect, there was a raised island in the middle of the manifold that met the rule. Otherwise, carved runners helped guide the path of the air and fuel mixture. Since combustion engines are essentially air pumps, this gained more than several horsepower, a significant edge on a restrictor plate track.
This development was later confirmed by engine builder Danny Lawrence of DEI and rival engine builder Randy Dorton of Hendrick Motorsports. Dorton, by contrast, was the master of getting more air through the plates by developments in the carburetors above it. When Hendrick driver Jeff Gordon won the Daytona 500 in 1997, midway in the race it was visually clear his Chevy and Earnhardt’s Childress car were developing the most power down the back straight—–a fact confirmed by their pit schedules, since more horsepower increases fuel consumption. Gordon’s advantage was in carburetion and the advantage of the Childress Chevy driven by Earnhardt was in the manifold underneath the carburetor and the restrictor plate. Both drivers were taking advantage of their superior horsepower by getting off Turn 2, which led to the long back straight, better than their teammates driving cars with similar engines.
Earnhardt, who had suffered through years of bad luck in the 500, was hampered all day by slow pit stops in that 1997 race eventually won by Gordon. The following year, Earnhardt finally claimed his long-sought Daytona 500 victory, in no small part because of the advantage with the Childress V-8 engine in addition to his enormous skill in the draft at Daytona.
After winning with Childress, the engine manifold secret was carried to his own DEI team by Earnhardt, always loyal, but never to a fault. In another crucial development, Earnhardt hired Richie Gilmore, who was the carburetor specialist at Hendrick Motorsports under Dorton, to run the engine program at DEI. As expected, Gilmore brought his carburetor expertise learned under Dorton with him.
By 2001, the combined work Gilmore did above the plate with the carburetor and the manifold development under it meant the DEI team had everybody covered when it came to horsepower on the plate tracks, an edge that would be sustained for four seasons, during which the DEI duo of Waltrip and Earnhardt Jr. won an incredible 11 of the 16 major races on those tracks.