NASCAR concerned with flying cars, vows action (cont'd)

"It'll be an across-the-board change," Darby said. "I know where [the question's] coming from. When we left Daytona [this year] after arguably one of the best Daytona 500s anybody had ever watched, there was a group of people that said 'holy crap, why would they change anything? That was just too good.'

"But for all of the same reasons that we decided to change to the wing initially, with the number one reason driving that being the appeal to the fans -- and the majority of the fans just don't like the wing -- so we're going to continue down that path. Everybody loves spoilers, nobody likes wings.

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The biggest roof flaps in the world or the biggest parachute in the world may not bring a car back to the race track once it's catapulted up off the race track from the forces of another car.

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-- JOHN DARBY

"What we did learn, and what we do with that is, we take the aero package that we left Daytona with, for example, and create a spoiler that replicates, as closely as we can, the same downforce and drag and all of the things that made that combination at Daytona work. And everybody says it's more visually appealing."

What was brutally ugly in the aftermath of Sunday's accident was Keselowski's badly warped Dodge. Penske Racing took Keselowski's car back to its shop complex in Mooresville, N.C., but it was going to deliver the car to NASCAR's R&D facility in Concord, N.C., this week, Darby said late Tuesday afternoon.

"We don't have it back here yet," Darby said. "But what I do know is that most of the ugliness came from sheet metal damage. There is some deformation of the rollcage in the left-front corner, which is fairly typical. Once we receive the car we will do a full study and measurement of everything -- what moved where, what worked and what worked well.

"The driver got out under his own power, out of the driver's window and pretty gingerly ran down the bank to the ambulance so if you look at 'pass' or 'fail' in its basic form you would have to say 'pass' because the driver was able to do that, right?

"From a structural or an engineering side of it, that's what our guys in the back room will be working on for the next couple of weeks, is a whole bunch of testing and measuring to see [what happened] and to give us an official report card from an engineering standpoint."

Helton said NASCAR's large crew of engineers at its R&D Center would pore over the data and Keselowski's ruined No. 12 Dodge race car. It mimics what NASCAR did last fall when Ryan Newman's No. 39 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet turned over at Talladega.

"What we're [going to do] with the No. 12 car is study it," Helton said. "We've got a lot of technology with data recorders, just like we do with the No. 39 car in Talladega. Now we've got the second element of the No. 12 car from Atlanta.

"We can look at the dimensions of the car, we can look at the impact that the car took and the reaction of the roll cage and the [roll] hoop and different elements that we saw that did their job, but how much better can we make those components work so that doesn't happen again?

"We also can look from the technology, the data recorder, the speeds, all the things that we have access to today to determine the high speed in Atlanta maybe on par with Daytona and Talladega now. If that's the case, where else does that transfer to? Then we'll come up with a reaction from all of that study."