SAFER barrier added in area of Hamlin crash

Posted on March 18, 2014 by

Hamlin missing the 2013 Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup was a byproduct of accident

When Denny Hamlin returns to Auto Club Speedway this week, he’ll find more of the SAFER barrier in the area where he crashed last year.

The Southern California facility has added an additional 1,000 feet of the Steel and Foam Energy Reduction barrier inside Turn 4, according to a track spokesman. The change was made in September, six months after Hamlin sustained a broken back vertebra after crashing into an unprotected area of the wall in the track’s Sprint Cup Series event last March.

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Hamlin missed four full races and most of a fifth after the crash, which occurred as he was racing Joey Logano for the victory on the final lap. The two drivers — who had feuded the week before at Bristol — made contact off the final corner, and Hamin’s car slid down the track and impacted an inside wall. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver was strapped to a backboard and airlifted to an area hospital, where he was diagnosed with a compression fracture of a lumbar vertebra.

In the wake of the accident, NASCAR officials said experts would reevaluate that section of the wall and recommend changes if necessary. SAFER barriers are typically first installed along the parts of track walls where impacts are most likely to occur, but it’s not uncommon for the barriers to be added or altered in reaction to accidents. A Jeff Gordon hit at Las Vegas, an Elliott Sadler incident at Pocono and a Jeff Fuller accident at Kentucky each resulted in changes being made to walls or barriers at those facilities.

Hamlin’s crash and subsequent layoff last season was a major factor in him missing the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup for the first time in his career as a driver at the sport’s highest level. He said last week that because of that incident, the 2-mile facility in Fontana now moves to the top of the list of tracks where he wants to win most.

"California is No. 1 simply because we never made it to the finish last year," he said at Bristol, where he finished sixth. "While we had a great shot to win it, we never made it. It would feel like you do have some redemption, and it would make a great story."

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Posted on March 18, 2014 by

Kenseth, Johnson, Harvick and the Busch brothers all led at Bristol and all found trouble

He had what might have been the best car in the field, but it hardly seemed that way buried in traffic and with the rear bumper cover ripped off. As he braced for another restart near the end of a long, weather-plagued day-into-night at Bristol Motor Speedway, Matt Kenseth keyed the radio button and emitted something resembling a sigh.

"All right," he said. "Sure has been eventful."

To say the least. Kenseth led 165 laps Sunday, far more than any other driver on the Tennessee short track, but at the end all he had to show for it was a banged-up race car and a 13th-place finish. And on an unforgiving day at the World’s Fastest Half-Mile, he was one of the fortunate ones.

"It was a disappointing ending, but it was a really positive day," the Joe Gibbs Racing driver said. "We led some laps. We were a lot stronger than we’ve been the last few weeks, so looking forward to hopefully taking that momentum to California.”

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By Bristol standards, he had reason to be pleased. Carl Edwards may have done a victory backflip after an odd finish that included the caution lights being inadvertently flipped on during the final laps of the race, but many other drivers took their turns at the front of the field Sunday — and were left with only frustration as a result. Kenseth, Kyle Busch, Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, Kevin Harvick — between them they led almost 70 percent of the event, but none of them were around to challenge Edwards at the end.

It was that kind of afternoon and evening at Bristol, and by those standards, Kenseth was among the lucky ones. The winner of the track’s regularly-scheduled night race last summer, Kenseth looked poised to take two in a row as he moved to the front early. He was running second behind Kurt Busch when traffic stacked up because of an accident involving Danica Patrick and Cole Whitt, and Timmy Hill slammed into the back of the 2003 champion as a result.

"That one car must not have seen the caution, and hit me going like 4,000 miles an hour," Kenseth said. Indeed, Hill said he wasn’t notified in time by his spotter, and took full blame for the incident. The contact forced Kenseth to make multiple pit stops, during which his crew cut damaged body parts — including that back bumper cover — off the car. He restarted 30th, as the last car on the lead lap, and then proceeded to rocket back up through the field.

In no time, Kenseth was back in the top 10, back in the top five, back in the lead. "We’ve had unbelievably good cars here the last two times," he said. "I was really pleased with my car once the race got rolling. I really felt pretty good about it if we could stay out of trouble, which we didn’t."

At Bristol? No chance. Kenseth was running in the top five on lap 408 when he suddenly bobbled up the track and pancaked the wall, falling back in the field in the process. "Really loose, bud," he told crew chief Jason Ratcliff over the radio, and after the next pit stop the No. 20 team discovered why — Kenseth had a flat left-rear tire. He tried to make one more charge through the field, but the vehicle simply wasn’t capable of it.

"For some reason, we just could never get the car tightened up again," Kenseth said. "Just really couldn’t go forward after that."

He was far from alone in that sentiment. Kyle Busch led 73 laps, third-most in the race behind Kenseth and Edwards, but wound up seven laps down in 29th after his car first suffered an undiagnosed issue, and later spun up into the wall. Johnson led 44 laps prior to a three-hour rain delay, but wound up two laps down in 19th after a tire came apart on him when the concrete track was still green. Kurt Busch led 28 laps, but finished 30 laps down in 35th after smacking the wall trying to miss his spinning younger brother, and then having to go to the garage with a broken ball joint.

And finally there was Harvick, who led 28 laps but finished 53 laps down in 39th after smoke began emanating from his car. He hit the wall, and drove into the garage area with part of the vehicle on fire. Crew chief Rodney Childers surmised a tire rubber fire burned into the oil line. "Disappointed but not mad," Harvick, who won earlier this season at Phoenix, wrote on Twitter. "Had the fastest car (three) weeks in a row." Harvick was leading last weekend’s race at Las Vegas when he suffered a hub failure that scuttled his hopes of a second consecutive victory.

Given all that, no wonder Kenseth emerged optimistic from a very long and difficult day at Bristol.

"I feel like a high school kid in my first race today — I felt like I bounced off of everything," he said. "It was definitely an eventful night. Certainly not the result that we wanted. There was a lot of positives that came out of tonight. I thought we performed really well on the race track — the strongest we’ve been so far this year.”

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