Catching air at Talladega not for the faint of heart (cont'd)

"It was just an amazing wreck. I look at that thing now, and I wonder how it didn't break my neck," said Wallace, taking time off from NASCAR broadcasts to prepare for the Indianapolis 500. "I was holding on and bracing myself. It bent the steering wheel forward about a foot. It broke my left wrist, but I should have broken my neck. It's a horrific, terrifying experience. But when you're knocked out, you don't know it. Then you wake up and you see it. Look at photographs of me coming out of that Birmingham hospital. I've got black and blue eyeballs and a cast on my left hand."

Wallace's 1993 accidents led NASCAR to mandate the use of roof flaps, which deploy when a car is sliding out of control, in an effort to keep it on the ground. They're not foolproof -- airborne accidents still unfold at Talladega almost every race weekend, although marked safety improvements in the cockpit area have helped drivers walk away. Sadler was airlifted to a hospital for observation after his 2003 accident, one of the most spectacular at Talladega since Wallace's a decade earlier.

At such speeds, all it takes is a little contact. Sadler's car was running along the inside when it was nudged by Kurt Busch, and then shot up into the air like a sail catching the wind. The car flipped over, bounced on its roof, rolled through the grass until it hit the racetrack apron, and then started rolling again. It came to rest on all four wheels, leaving a trail of wreckage behind it.

"We're used to motor noises, and sometimes when you spin out you hear screeching noises as tires rub across the asphalt, but when you go up into the air, it's dead silence," said Sadler, the pole winner for last year's spring race at Talladega, which hosts the Nextel Cup tour Sunday.

"The motor cuts off, and you're flying through the air, and there's no screeching of the tires. Everything gets kind of dark when you start flipping like that. It's a pretty scary feeling. You feel like if you're a racecar driver spinning out, you can do different things in the car to kind of control which side of the car you're going to hit on, kind of manipulate it a little bit. But when you're up in the air and flipping, you're just a passenger. It's pretty scary. It's a lot worse than hitting the wall. I'd rather keep my stuff on the ground and leave it like that."

Wallace can relate. "When you get off the ground, and it's in the air, it's dead quiet. At that point, that's when you're just scared to death. Maybe that's not the right word. Maybe you're fearing what's next. When you're in that silence, you know it's going to hit something. You know it's got to come back down. You just don't know how hard it's going to hit when it lands."

It happens fast, but some drivers still try to prepare themselves. Once the car goes airborne, Sadler grips the steering wheel tightly in an attempt to keep his arms close to his body, and bends his 6-foot-2 frame into a tuck, keeping his head as low as possible in case he lands on his roof. As the accident unfolds, drivers can usually tell when their car is about to take off -- it happens when the vehicle turns sideways or backward, and that onrushing air that was keeping the nose glued to the asphalt suddenly turns into propellant.

"NASCAR has done a lot of things to prevent them from flipping over, but the way the cars are shaped, they're designed to go forward, not backward. As soon as they start to go backward, air gets underneath the car in a way that creates lift," said Mears, whose Busch car flipped over and slid on its roof in a 2005 race at Talladega.

"When you're going forward, it creates downforce, but when you're going backward, it actually creates lift. There are roof flaps and cowl flaps that try to relieve the pressure, but there's still a big cavity there that can't help but catch air. So anytime you spin around and go backward, you know there's a possibility that the thing can go upside down, especially at those speeds." (Continued)