Catching air at Talladega not for the faint of heart

Once it stopped rolling and finally came to rest, it hardly looked like a racecar any more. The tires had been flung off, and were bouncing away in every direction. The engine had been thrown from its housing. Pieces of the black and gold vehicle had been shredded and sheared and mangled, leaving much of the bare roll cage exposed. The roof had been flattened as if stepped on by a giant foot.

Deep inside the car, barely conscious, Rusty Wallace had one thought: Why does my hand keep falling off the steering wheel?

Later, after being airlifted to a hospital, he would learn why. Wallace had a broken left wrist, one of several injuries he suffered in his wild, flipping crash at Talladega Superspeedway in the spring of 1993. The 10-inch pin implanted in his forearm serves as a permanent reminder of that day, and of the terrifying tendency cars have of going airborne at the mammoth 2.66-mile Alabama track.

Despite restrictor plates that limit top speeds at NASCAR's two biggest venues, despite roof flaps designed to keep out-of-control cars on the ground, it still happens. Bobby Labonte, flipping over in 2001. Elliott Sadler, soaring into the air near the end of Talladega races in 2003 and 2004. Scott Riggs, barrel-rolling down the frontstretch in 2005. Even Busch races aren't immune -- Casey Mears flipped over onto his roof in a 2005 event, and Tony Stewart rolled over and bounced off the asphalt last April.

Drivers are tough men who have numbed themselves to the risk of going fast. They don't scare easily. But few things make them more uncomfortable than the sounds of banging and grinding giving way to silence. That's when they know the car has gone airborne, and the big hit is on its way.

"It's real eerie and real quiet and death-defying at the same time," said Wallace, the 1989 champion of NASCAR's premier series, and now a television analyst. "When it's all said and done, you look at the pictures of massive destruction and you go holy s--t, I don't know how I survived that thing."

Wallace became an authority on airborne restrictor-plate accidents in the 1993 season alone. His Daytona 500 ended when another car clipped his No. 2 Pontiac, sending it flipping 20 feet into the air. Fortunately, he walked away with no injuries. Three months later at Talladega, while battling for position on the final lap, a tap from Dale Earnhardt sent his car airborne again, in an accident nearly identical to the first one. Except this time, he woke up in a helicopter carrying him to a hospital in Birmingham, where he learned he had a broken wrist, facial cuts, a concussion and a chipped tooth.

Even today, he knows he could have been much worse. Those two accidents came a decade before NASCAR mandated the use of head-and-neck restraining devices. (Continued)