CONCORD, N.C. — A trackside photo dating back to the early 2000s popped up on a large screen Thursday morning at the NASCAR Research & Development Center, and a wave of memories started flooding back. Dr. Dean Sicking stood there in the picture, flanked by his team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on either side of a revolutionary retaining wall of their own creation.
Many of those team members were back by his side Thursday, celebrating the significant work led by Sicking, who was there to soak it all in.
“It’s been a wonderful experience because I spent hours and hours and hours with these people, and it’s great to see everybody here and celebrating the SAFER barrier work,” Sicking said. “I just can’t describe it.”
Sicking, a pioneer in both motorsports and roadside safety, was an honored guest at the NASCAR Research & Development Center on Thursday, one day ahead of his recognition as the Landmark Award recipient for outstanding contributions to stock-car racing at the NASCAR Hall of Fame Class of 2025 induction ceremonies.
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Sicking’s work in developing the SAFER (Steel And Foam Energy Reduction) barrier system has been an indispensable advance in motorsports safety. The impact-absorbing walls were first installed at a major speedway 23 years ago and have since become a mainstay at every track on the NASCAR schedule.
The Landmark Award is the latest in a series of accolades for the 67-year-old innovator. Dr. Sicking was presented with the prestigious Bill France Award of Excellence in 2003, and he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation — the country’s top award for technological achievement — from President George W. Bush in 2005.
“Who thinks about that?” Sicking said in reflection. “Nobody dreams about that because it doesn’t seem possible — and it still doesn’t seem possible that it happened to me.”
The SAFER barrier invention came during Sicking’s time as a civil engineering professor and director of the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility (MwRSF) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He later moved to study and teach at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, where he became a faculty member in 2012, but his work from his UNL days remains an enduring, life-saving legacy.
That calling card was foremost on NASCAR Hall of Fame voters’ minds when his candidacy was considered last May. His Landmark Award recognition arrived in his first year on the ballot.
“I was glad that he got the award and got recognized for his work because honestly, it’s saved a lot of drivers’ lives, and for him to develop something like that, it should go recognized and noticed,” said Ryan Blaney, who served on the Hall of Fame Voting Panel that year as the Cup Series’ reigning champion from 2023. “From a driver standpoint, it’s one of the best inventions we’ve ever had. I mean, outside of the HANS (Head And Neck Support) Device, I put those two up there as the two most important safety measures that NASCAR and other sporting series have done. It was neat to sit on that panel as a voter as well, so it’s nice that he’s getting recognized for it.”
Racing officials first reached out to Sicking in the late 1990s, first as IndyCar sought a technical solution to reduce the severity of racing impacts. That effort was later joined by NASCAR, which experienced a series of fatal crashes in that time period — from Adam Petty to Kenny Irwin Jr. to Tony Roper to the death of seven-time Cup Series champion Dale Earnhardt in 2001.
Early prototypes for an energy-dissipating barrier were made of plastic at IndyCar’s insistence, but that material was abandoned after studies showed that those walls allowed vehicles to gouge into it with a jarring, halting effect. The final SAFER product combined a sturdy barrier of steel tubing backed by bundled foam — a system that was more forgiving than a bare, concrete wall when vehicles struck it.
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Kurt Busch was the first Cup Series driver to crash into a SAFER barrier, making heavy driver’s-side contact during the 2002 Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Not only was Busch uninjured, but he was well enough to show his trackside displeasure for his run-in with rival Jimmy Spencer before boarding the ambulance for a precautionary trip to the infield care center.
NASCAR officials have learned plenty about the use of SAFER barriers in the days since. Jerry Nadeau’s severe crash into a wall without the SAFER system in place at Richmond Raceway in May 2003 demonstrated that the need was not isolated to larger, faster speedways. Kyle Busch’s injury-causing wreck during an Xfinity Series race at Daytona in 2015 showed that race cars will find unprotected walls, sparking an outcry for more widespread implementation of SAFER-equipped barriers. The analysis of crash angles has also been evolutionary; Sicking recalls being a passenger in the pace car years ago with Kurt Busch, who wanted to show him firsthand how a just-installed barrier at Charlotte Motor Speedway had created a harsh transition. He laughs today about the experience, saying that the intense, high-speed nature of the pace-car ride provided him with more than enough proof.
“The barriers get constant chatter and accolades when the driver can climb out of the car, but I just don’t know that they have a great appreciation, and maybe even some of us have forgotten or overlooked the importance of that day, that era, that relationship and what we learned from Dr. Sicking,” said NASCAR Vice Chairman Mike Helton. “We were in the performance business, and yes, safety was important, and we were kind of reacting to safety more than proactive to it, but that era with all of you and Dr. Sicking taught us the science of safety in and around a race car — things that I never thought we might learn, we’ve learned.”
Sicking, his family and many former colleagues were present at the R&D Center on the eve of the Hall of Fame festivities for tributes, stories and a brief tour. The facility has blossomed since its founding in 2002, and the embrace of technological advances that Sicking and his team championed have helped to drive its growth.
Those Nebraska team members took turns sharing stories Thursday about Sicking’s workaholic approach, his painstaking attention to detail, plus his tendency to sometimes walk barefoot in the office hallways. The team effort that was crucial to developing the SAFER barrier was top of mind, but so was Sicking’s leadership in making the project go.
“It’s kind of like reminiscing with this family again that we had a big role in an industry to make major progress,” said Ron Faller, the current director at the MwRSF who worked as a principal investigator alongside Sicking and traveled to many tracks to inspect new SAFER installations. “Seeing the videos, hearing all the speakers, it’s emotional actually to me to come together and enjoy this together because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Dean and all of us to be celebrating with him something that was greatness, being accomplished together as a team.
“… It was history in the making, and to cap it all off (Friday) night is a once-in-a-lifetime event for all of us, and I’m going to take it all in. I’ll never probably experience that again, but it’s going to be a celebration of work for keeping drivers alive and going home to their families at night is how we look at it. We deal with highway safety every day that way. This is no different. We want people to go home and see their children and their families after their work day. So that’s why we did it, and we wanted to innovate and push us to the limits to something we weren’t doing, and it really moved us to another level, taking this work on.”