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.

"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."

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."