By the time Michael McDowell visited the media center at Texas Motor Speedway after his horrific wreck during qualifying one day earlier, highlights of the incident already had sealed his place in NASCAR infamy.

In an instant -- but one that seemed to play out in slow motion over a stretch of forever -- the rookie driver for Michael Waltrip Racing became the new Sprint Cup Series poster boy for safety.

"I think it's pretty remarkable that I'm here today, driving," McDowell said last Saturday, before taking his replacement No. 00 Toyota onto the track for practice. He ended up finishing 33rd in the subsequent Samsung 500, but that wasn't what he will be remembered for that weekend.

It was, in fact, pretty remarkable that McDowell was standing anywhere, ever again, after what transpired. Heading into Turn 1 on his second qualifying lap, McDowell's car wiggled and began to lose grip. Then it abruptly shot up the track as he tried to catch it before it began to spin. The end result was that he slammed nearly head-on into the outside SAFER barrier, then flipped upside down and skidded down the track for several hundred yards before beginning a series of eight terrifying barrel rolls and finally coming to rest right-side up on the backstretch.

"His wreck was pretty horrific," driver Kyle Busch said.

"That was a very, very hard hit -- and then there was all that happened after the hit," added Carl Edwards, the driver who would go on to win the Samsung 500.

Television announcers Larry McReynolds and Darrell Waltrip lamented that it was as bad a wreck as they had ever seen. All agreed that McDowell was fortunate to be able to walk away.

Or was he? In other words, how much did good fortune have to do with it?

Or was it simply the type of result from an accident that the sport has rightly come to expect in the wake of seven years of aggressive approach to improved safety? This approach has included introduction of a dramatically new car, the SAFER barriers now mandated at all NASCAR tracks (but not yet on all walls), and other developments such as the HANS neck-restraint device that prevents the heads of drivers from snapping forward violently upon impact.

Five weeks earlier, at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, driver Jeff Gordon was involved in an accident that both terrified and ultimately infuriated him. He ended up spinning and striking an abutment on an inside retaining wall that was not protected by a SAFER barrier.

Gordon was furious that the wall was not closed off and/or protected by a SAFER barrier -- the softer wall first dreamed up by Tony George for Indy car racing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and later taken to a further level of development by the University of Nebraska and ultimately NASCAR. Walls protected by SAFER barriers give, absorbing much of the impact when they are struck by cars moving at speeds of up to nearly 200 mph.

One day after the accident at LVMS, Gordon spoke directly with Bruton Smith, whose Speedway Motorsports Inc. owns the track, and with Chris Powell, who runs the track for SMI, about correcting the problem. He said they were receptive and promised to get it fixed before the next Sprint Cup race is run there.

"If you look at the SAFER barriers, that is huge. I think that while they put in everything that was recommended by the University of Nebraska and NASCAR, I don't think there should be any spot that a car can possibly get to on a racetrack that doesn't have them -- inside, outside walls, it doesn't matter," Gordon said. "I just want it to be better. I just don't want it to happen again."

Gordon said that all the other safety variables fell right into their proper place in Vegas. He suggested immediately after the accident that seven or eight years earlier, he probably would not have survived the accident -- a blunt statement he wasn't backing away from five weeks after the fact.

He knew the wreck in Vegas was bad not just because it looked that way on the highlight reels, but because of how awful he felt afterward for a full week.

"I was sore, but it was a different kind of sore than I have gone through before," he said. "It was like sore through my abdomen. I hit my elbow and things like that and my foot. You might have sore ribs or something like that other times, but this went like farther through my whole body. I went pretty far forward.

"Thankfully, everything did its job. The HANS device, the seat and the way the car crushed. Everything did its job except for the wall. Hitting that was not fun."

Much has been made about the new car's drivability -- or lack thereof -- but more is, and should be, made about its improved overall level of safety. It has a number of features that make it safer than the car it has replaced: a larger cockpit, with a double-frame rail on the driver's side with steel plating covering the door bars; energy-absorbing materials installed between the roll-cage door bars and door panels; and a safer fuel cell, including more honey-combed, energy-absorbing material packed around it.

Driver Jeff Burton said that he believes NASCAR should not risk sacrificing the improved safety in any way to better the way the car drives.

"I think we can do both," he said. "I mean I think we can continue to push to make it safer and we can also continue to work to make them so that we can race them better. I have to tell you that I think the racing to this point has been pretty good.

"NASCAR has had their feet dug in the sand about making changes to the car, putting it on the teams to make the car drive better -- which I support."

Burton said that, like everything else in NASCAR, he expects the car to continue to evolve over time. He said that improving safety is an ongoing battle that never ends, or at least it never should end.

"I by no means believe that the car we're racing today is the same car that we're going to be racing three years from now. I'm sure that there are changes coming both from a safety and a performance standpoint," Burton said.

Yet safety efforts cannot end with looking solely at the car, Burton and Gordon and others strongly contend.

"I believe we've got to continue to look at racetracks, too," Burton said. "We saw at Vegas that there was a racetrack problem. There are other racetracks that have to be fixed, too."

When that subject comes up, the next word out of drivers' mouths usually is this: Pocono. They have been holding Cup races at Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa., since 1974, and it has been the site of some of NASCAR's most famous wrecks. In fact, one occurred in the very first race held there in August of 1974, when driver Lennie Pond lost control of the Chevrolet he was driving and ended up in nearby Monroe County Hospital with a broken shoulder blade after wrecking.

In 1986, popular driver Harry Gant was hospitalized for two days after suffering a bruised heart, a concussion and severe bruises in an accident at Pocono. In 1988, legendary driver Bobby Allison's career was ended at Pocono on a first-lap crash that left him with a cerebral concussion, blunt abdominal trauma and a broken thighbone. He also suffered memory loss and other physical problems that continue to plague him now, 20 years after the accident.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Steve Park, then teammates at Dale Earnhardt Inc., spun off the track and into the grass infield in a spectacular but scary wreck in 2002 at Pocono. Remarkably, neither was seriously injured -- even though Park's car hit the guardrail and flipped several times before coming to rest upside down.

One of the problems at Pocono always has been that if drivers stray just slightly off the track, they get into bumpy flats of grass that cause air to get under their cars and flip them. Plus the guardrails supposedly protecting cars from going into the infield are antiquated at best, totally inadequate at worst -- according to the track's many and harshest critics.

"Pocono has been going on for a long time," Burton said. "The backstretch at Pocono is ridiculous. Davey Allison got into the grass and flipped on the guardrail there 15, 18 years ago. And today it's the same guardrail, the same grass, with the exception that the guardrail now has dirt behind it.

"It's time for them to step up and fix it. We've been trying to get it fixed for years. The racetrack needs to step up -- and my point in saying that is we need to look at everything. We need to look at all the equipment to be safer, for it to be safer for the fans, the pit crews, the drivers. And we can't ever stop on that."

Two-time defending Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson also singled out Pocono, where the Sprint Cup Series will visit June 8 for the Pocono 500. A second 2008 race will be held there on Aug. 3.

"I think Pocono certainly is a track that needs to be changed around immediately," Johnson said. "It's probably further behind than any other track that's out there.

"But still, even the tracks that are the most advanced today still need work. And unfortunately in our sport, everybody responds after something bad takes place. They need to be proactive and they need to look at a lot of different areas."

The dicey grass areas at Pocono particularly baffle Johnson, as do the venue's outdated guardrails. Drivers and other sources say that some tracks are slow to make significant improvements because track owners often do not want to spend the money to make them, and that NASCAR can't always get the owners to do what they want them to do.

"I don't see any reason whatsoever to have grass from the inside wall to the outside wall," Johnson said. "Grass does not slow the vehicle down; it gets the car airborne, speeds it up in some cases.

"The other thing that Pocono has is they still have guardrails. I mean, that technology is from the '80s and it can be better. It needs to be better. Hopefully all the tracks will listen. I know it's expensive [to upgrade], but it's not worth losing somebody over and it's not worth hurting someone."

In addition to the new car and improvements at many of the tracks, Gordon said another important advance in recent years was the HANS device -- the head-and-neck restraint system that prevents drivers' heads from snapping forward at the point of impact during an accident. "Mandating the HANS device was huge," Gordon said.

It is part of the late Dale Earnhardt's legacy that the HANS device was introduced. It became mandatory to wear one after it was determined it might have saved his life in the accident during the 2001 Daytona 500 that instead ended in his tragic death. Earnhardt's accident shook NASCAR to its core -- coming on the heels of the racing deaths of Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and Tony Roper.

Their deaths over a 10-month period ultimately led to NASCAR's deeper involvement in the evolution and installation of SAFER barriers, improved seat technology for the drivers, and even the long-range development of the new car that finally began hitting tracks last year.

Brett Bodine, NASCAR's director of cost research who was instrumental in helping develop, test and fine-tune the new car now being used, was a driver when Earnhardt and the others died so tragically.

"When all that was happening with Dale and Tony Roper and Kenny Irwin and Adam Petty, I think NASCAR was starting to understand cause-and-effect. ... But that's really part of the process. You realize you have a problem and you become educated about the problem and you start working on it," Bodine said.

"To say Dale's death was the watershed mark, I don't think that's appropriate. I think it was part of it -- because as a racer at that time, I was always working on things. I was a competitor at the time, and I was always looking for a better seat or to make sure my restraint systems were mounted correctly. I was always looking at seat mounting and head-surround [protection]. I was the first one to wear a HANS device, and that was nine months before Dale was killed."

Bodine said that he and his racing brothers, former driver Geoffrey Bodine and current Truck Series driver Todd Bodine, learned the importance of safety at an early age from their late father, Eli, who ran a small racetrack named Chemung Speedrome in upstate New York for 25 years.

"He made seatbelts mandatory [in the 1950s], and he had a driver revolt," Bodine said. "Our family kind of broadly gets credited for working on safety throughout our careers. Well, that's just because we're racers. The guy who really showed that to us was our dad -- because he owned a racetrack, and he had to pay insurance premiums. And he knew if he did things better for his competitors, and made them do better things in regards to safety, that it was going to pay off for him in the end along with protecting them. So that mindset was placed in us a long time ago by our dad.

"Being a racetrack promoter, reading the rule book and having to enforce safety things like making drivers wear safety belts when they weren't wearin' 'em, that was a pretty strong statement by him. So we've been used to working on safety all along."

His father had an unwelcome but surefire motivator in his long-running crusade for better safety in racing, much the same as NASCAR later did.

"We had one fatality at our racetrack, and my dad just worked so hard not to ever let that happen again," Bodine said.

McDowell's wreck in Texas was a reminder of how dangerous a sport it can be. The fact that he walked away from the accident was an indication that much of what NASCAR has attempted to do to make it safer since Earnhardt's passing is working.

Bodine said as he watched the wreck unfold, he was concerned but calmly confident that the combination of all safety factors would protect the driver and allow him to survive the mind-numbing, body-jarring crash.

"To be honest with you, you're just concerned, obviously," Bodine said. "But you're confident in the work that the whole group has done -- starting with the SAFER barrier; and you know the car was built by a good race team; and you know that everything was buttoned up safety-wise because of the way they did things; and of course our officiating staff with officiating all the events and checking everything that they do in regards to safety that they do every week; and you believed what the car was all about.

"That's what has given us the confidence to say that the car is definitely safer than what we had previously. There is not one piece that was responsible for the outcome -- it was the whole safety initiative working as a unit that made that outcome successful."

At the same time, the fact is that not all walls at tracks are protected by SAFER barriers and some have openings in their inside walls -- whether for safety equipment, maintenance vehicles or whatever -- that remain highly dangerous. So there is more to be done.

"There is always more to be done. We never stop looking, we never stop working," Bodine insisted.

Cup champion Johnson added: "These cutouts, you look at Jeff Gordon's impact at Vegas, and that's one of the more modern facilities that we have -- but there is a problem there. We need to work on that and address that, and from what I understand they are doing that there. But all those kickouts and cutouts where safety vehicles come onto racetracks need to be revamped and looked at, wherever they are."

Then, of course, there are the widespread dangers of a place like Pocono. The lesson is that the safety police can never take a day off. Not in the racing world.

"Everybody needs to stay focused on continuing to evolve the safety in the sport," Johnson said.

Shortly after McDowell's wreck, his car owner and fellow driver, Michael Waltrip, took a look at what was left of McDowell's No. 00 Toyota in the garage and shook his head. Then he carefully went around and began hugging crew members and other employees at Michael Waltrip Racing. He knew that without the SAFER barrier to absorb much of the initial impact of McDowell's hit, combined with the improved safety features of NASCAR's new car and all else that was involved, they might have been hugging for different, far sadder reasons.

"You appreciate the effort, not only by your own team but by NASCAR and others," Waltrip said. "Tony George was instrumental in the creation of the SAFER barrier, for instance. Millions of dollars were spent to try to make a car that is safer. It was through the passion of Brett Bodine and [vice president of competition] Robin Pemberton and the passion that NASCAR has in that car that it happened.

"To make the tracks safer has been costly. But when you see a wreck like that, it sure does make you feel good about what we've accomplished."

McDowell added: "I want to thank everybody at NASCAR who worked hard on making this new car safe and all the tracks that have spent the money and took the time to add the SAFER barriers. Obviously, it was a life saver."