An unseen champion of NASCAR's safety efforts

His name was unknown to most of the people who filled the grandstands for a NASCAR race. But every time a driver walked away from a crash, fans witnessed the handiwork of Steve Peterson.

Peterson, NASCAR's technical director since 1995, was found dead in his Concord, N.C., home on Tuesday, apparently of natural causes. The 58-year-old automotive engineer wasn't a public figure. He was largely unknown to even the most ardent of fans, and only occasionally quoted by journalists. But he left an indelible mark on a sport that he helped change for the better, spearheading a number of safety initiatives that transformed NASCAR from a series with a lethal safety problem to one that now stands as an example around the world.

"Steve had a passion for the sport, and his passion was safety -- for the drivers, for the tracks, for the cars, all of it. It was almost like it was his life's mission," said Jim Hunter, NASCAR's vice president for corporate communications. "He was always looking to improve safety in any of those areas, and was very instrumental in pushing safety initiatives to NASCAR senior management. Steve was an engineer, so he didn't guess or speculate. He dealt in facts."

When NASCAR first became involved in what would become the Steel and Foam Energy Reduction (SAFER) barrier, it was Peterson who was dispatched to Lincoln, Neb., to work with officials from the Indy Racing League and the system's developers at the Midwest Roadside Facility. It was Peterson who lobbied for five years for the implementation of the Head and Neck Support (HANS) device, a life-saving head restraint system that was finally made mandatory in 2002. It was Peterson who went to the Roush Fenway shop early last season to inspect damage after driver Greg Biffle complained of smoldering foam in the right side of the circuit's new racecar.

Gary Nelson, NASCAR's former vice president for research and development and still a consultant to the series, hired Peterson because of his engineering background. "Right away, it became obvious that he was a racer that cared about racers," Nelson said. "In doing that, he was able to take his engineering skills and apply them to ways to make the sport better, and what stood out the most was safety. He was well into the safety conversation with experts right away. Even in the mid '90s when he first started, he was already an expert."

Harraka remembers

Paulie Harraka, a member of NASCAR's Drive for Diversity, won his fifth Whelen All-American Series Late Model main event on July 12 in Roseville, Calif. He returned home to North Carolina and attempted to reach his friend, NASCAR technical director Steve Peterson, to give him the news, but he was unsuccessful. On Tuesday, he found that Peterson had passed away from natural causes.

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• Peterson dies in his home

Peterson didn't just study seatbelts, he compared specifications from the military to those in racing to those of the Society of Automotive Engineers. Before he arrived at NASCAR, drivers looking for the best safety devices had only the word of the vendor who sold them. So Peterson began buying safety equipment anonymously over the counter, and bringing the pieces back for examination.

"What Steve did was separate the fact from fiction with science," Nelson said. "He was able to scientifically disprove what's good, what's best, or what's better. He did that by starting a process through which you would anonymously go out and buy a product and go test it, as if you were a racer putting it in your car. When he came up with that idea, I thought that was just the neatest thing to take away all of the opinions and all of the sales brochures and all of the B.S., really. He came up with that process, and it will benefit racers forever."

He presented crash data to Dean Sicking's team at the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility after Jeff Gordon's harrowing accident at Las Vegas earlier this season. He went back to Nebraska to monitor crash tests of the foam being used in the sides of the new car. He would speak for NASCAR on panels hosted by the SAE, which awarded Peterson its motorsports achievement award in 2006. He helped develop the short-lived but well-intentioned roof hatch. When the makers of the HANS found a crack in Kyle Busch's device following a crash last year at Talladega, they sent the device to Peterson for examination.

Crush zones. Roll bar padding. Better seats. If it was safety and it was NASCAR, Peterson had a hand in it. He was the sport's "safety guru," Hunter said. "Steve had his handprint on every safety initiative NASCAR ever had."

Hand-in-hand with Nelson, Peterson helped bring what was once called the Car of Tomorrow from idea to reality, the most recent in a long line of what his former boss called "immeasurable" contributions to the sport. A Western Michigan graduate who could lose you in acronyms like FEA and LS-DYNA, Peterson was a lifetime member of the World Karting Association who loved building and racing go-karts in his spare time. On trips to Phoenix, he and Nelson would disappear into the desert to compete against friends.

His death came as a total shock. But his work was important, and his contributions will be remembered every time a driver climbs out of a crumpled car. "His legacy," Hunter said, "is that drivers for years to come are going to benefit from Steve Peterson's input and his passion for safety in our sport."

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.

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