Backflips at the track are OK for Carl Edwards. Credit: Autostock

Driver contracts: Signing on the dotted line

Racing is inherently dangerous. The men and women who actually drive the cars live with the knowledge that one day, something might go terribly wrong and they may pay the ultimate price for the sport that they love.

The best safety measures can do the most to prevent injuries on the job, but how do you regulate what drivers do away from the track?

It's not easy, as Penske Racing South's Don Miller and Roush Racing's Geoff Smith can attest.

Miller, president of Penske South, has had a long and varied history with many drivers, and he was with Penske in 1974 when Gary Bettenhausen first forced team owners to begin putting clauses in contracts prohibiting certain activities off the track.

Ryan Newman

The first of those activities is driving race cars owned by other people, or those outside stock car racing.

Bettenhausen was big into sprint cars, Silver Crown cars and midgets, and when he finally made the big-time with Penske in Indy Cars, he didn't lose the bug for driving open-wheel cars on dirt. His run as a star in Indy Cars ended one April day at the New York State Fairgrounds in Syracuse.

"He wanted to do a sprint car race and Roger reluctantly let him do it," Miller said. "He got upside down and wound up on the roof of the refreshment stand and tore his arm up and paralyzed himself on the right side and lost his ride.

"Since that time we have a couple of clauses in the current contracts that discourage anyone from trying to compete in another sport where they could get hurt."

However, Miller said a driver's contract can include the words "mutual consent."

"If we want to let (a driver) go and drive in the IROC series we can do that, or say something came along, some special race," Miller said. "Normally, if they're committed to the team, they're committed to the team."

Miller said the key is allowing drivers to race outside of Nextel Cup when it makes sense to do so.

"Seat time in the proper series at the proper race tracks is a benefit," Miller said. "Seat time in other race cars on different race tracks doesn't make any sense at all. Most everyone has a clause like that in their contract.

"We would never discourage him from doing something in a Grand National car because they race on the same kind of tracks and same tires. That's good sense. Bad sense would be to let him do a World of Outlaws race on some dirt track. That would be stupid."

Ken Schrader, who loves dirt racing so much he bought his own dirt track in Pevely, Mo., quit driving open-wheel cars once he started racing for Rick Hendrick, largely because of Bettenhausen's example.

There are other pursuits that are just as dangerous, as athletes in other sports demonstrate every so often. Kellen Winslow II, tight end for the NFL's Cleveland Browns, will miss the 2005 season after injuring his knee in a motorcycle crash.

How do NASCAR team owners deal with the fact that racers are inherent thrillseekers and love to do dangerous things?

"We get similar lines of questioning about whether our contracts prevent our drivers from skydiving, do they prohibit the drivers from skiing, what do they prohibit the drivers from doing," said Smith, general manager of Roush Racing. "The way our sport is regulated, which is actually a form of deregulation more than it is a form of regulation, the contracts are such that drivers can end up being relatively quickly replaced in the event of injury from any cause and in most cases after a short period when a driver is absent the sponsor can cancel the agreement.

"If a driver isn't bright enough to figure out that they need to take care of themselves when every economic incentive will disappear if they don't, then we've got the wrong kind of drivers."

Smith then brought up one key difference between racers and other pro athletes: guaranteed contracts.

"That makes our situation completely different from pro sports where they have multi-year guaranteed contracts," Smith said. "In many cases, if they're injured on the job they continue to get paid. But in those sports they're getting paid from the revenue of the sport as a whole.

"In automobile racing, you don't get revenue from the sport as a whole. You only get revenue from the sponsors you've got in front of you."

Smith said drivers end up policing themselves because of that fact.

"There is all this economic incentive for them to be careful about what they're doing so that's already in place," Smith said. "And the other thing is that when you get close to these personalities of people that want to go out and engage in a driving contest at 190 miles per hour with 42 guys around them, well, those kind of personalities are generally a little more inclined to want to demonstrate that they can do the double-back flip off of the skateboard while going down a ramp-backwards."

Smith said that his knowledge, Roush Racing has never regulated what a driver does outside of racing, but has had problems with crew members racing to the detriment of their primary employer. Drivers must get Smith to sign off on it, and they must obtain one more signature to seal the deal: Jack Roush.

Carl Edwards

"We do regulate our driver's participation in any other type of racing event," Smith said. "To my knowledge, we have not turned down any of those requests but we want to understand about what the race team is, how safe we think the equipment is, and how safe we think the environment is.

"Our whole philosophy is 100 percent of your energy is what it takes to make this race team work to the best of its potential and therefore we're going to be quite guarded about just going off having fun here and there."

Smith said the problem with adding provisos to driver contracts comes when trying to figure out exactly what constitutes a dangerous activity.

"If you start getting into the list of dangerous occupations, the creative side of me started to get into a contract that says to Carl Edwards, 'This year you will not be running with the bulls at Pamplona,' " Smith said. "There are so many activities that you can do that there's just no way to restrict it and frankly it would be a shame if we had to write a restriction into a contract and we'd only do it if we thought the driver wasn't smart enough to figure it out for himself."

In short, racing teams count on drivers to be smart enough not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, and adjust their contracts accordingly.