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

And then there's the disorientation. When drivers go airborne, they're often unsure of the car's position, or what's coming next. In many cases, it's a hard impact, or a hit from another vehicle. Mears was fortunate ? his Busch car flipped gracefully, and went into a long slide. The toughest part was climbing out the car while hanging upside down.

"You're not really cognizant of how you're sitting," Mears said. "You don't know if you're going to come down on our nose, your tail, or your side. You don't know if you're going to flip more. As soon as it gets quiet, you know something is going bad. You just try to brace yourself the best you can. Your seat belt has you in, but what I did was grab the bottom of the wheel with both my hands and hang on. Fortunately, no one else hit me, and it was a nice smooth slide."

But not always. The worst wrecks in NASCAR are typically the least spectacular; blunt slams into outside walls that force the driver and car to absorb all the energy. In airborne crashes, the rolling and flipping allows the energy to dissipate, and often the driver to walk away. But that doesn't mean such accidents are painless.

"When you hit a wall, you hit it once really hard. At a place like Dover, you might bounce off the outside wall and hit the inside wall. You might hit it twice hard," Sadler said. "When you're flipping, when I flipped at Talladega in 2003, I hit six or seven times really hard. I felt over 20 (G-forces) with each hit, and by the end of it, you're pretty much beat up and out of breath. You feel like you've been in a boxing match. It's a lot tougher wreck than just staying on the ground."

Sometimes, the bruises aren't only physical.

"After Daytona, I got back in the car and it was no problem. Your mind says it's just a fluke," Wallace said. "Then when I did it again four or five races later at Talladega, that's when I thought, this is getting crazy. It worried me, it really did. It worried me a little bit. It made me not put the car into positions I would normally put myself into. Then when the roof flaps came out, it gave me more of a secure feel, because I watched other guys spin out and not get airborne."

NASCAR changed to a restrictor plate with smaller openings for last year's fall race at Talladega, concerned that the recently-repaved track was generating speeds that were too fast. Those same plates, featuring holes 7/8ths of an inch in diameter, will be used for Sunday's event. Drivers say the smaller plate openings cut down on acceleration, although the cars still ran similar speeds.

"We can change plates all day long down there. It's really not going to change the handling of the car right now," Sadler said. "We're all going to be packed up together. We're all going to be three-wide Sunday for four hours. It's just the way this racetrack is, and it's just the way restrictor-plate racing is. There's nothing we can really do about it. NASCAR is just going to try and keep us under that 200 mph window to help keep us on the ground and keep us out of the grandstands."