From the moment Michael McDowell's battered Toyota finally came to a stop at Texas Motor Speedway earlier this month, events were immediately being put into motion at the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility several hundred miles to the north. At the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, facility director Dr. Dean Sicking was about to receive a phone call from NASCAR officials.

"They contacted me Friday night, about an hour and 30 minutes after the crash," he said of McDowell's April 4 qualifying accident (watch video). "We have a close working relationship with NASCAR's research group, and whenever they have a hard crash, they send the data to us and we evaluate it. That's the only way we can maintain an in-service performance evaluation, is the term we use in our industry."

Sicking designed the Steel and Foam Energy Reducing barrier -- or SAFER, for short. It's because of his team's work that drivers like McDowell are now able to walk away from accidents that just a few years ago may have resulted in death.

"When you see that crash, and the video of that crash, you can see it's a very hard hit," Sicking said. "Primarily in the amount of motion that was observed in the SAFER wall. Because these impacts occur over such a short period of time, real-time video seldom catches the visible deformation of the wall. It was quite obvious in this crash that it did crush the wall quite a bit, even in the real-time video.

"Right away, I knew it was a very hard hit. When we got the data from NASCAR, it confirmed that yes, it was one of the hardest hits they've ever seen on a SAFER barrier."

Taking safety seriously

Autostock

Jeff Gordon credited the soft wall at Pocono and other safety initiatives after a driver's side impact crash in 2006.

Auto racing and safety have gone hand in hand, almost from the first moment that drivers decided to race each other more than 100 years ago. It provides a real-time proving ground for all aspects of automotive safety -- and some of the inventions and improvements to passenger cars can be directly attributed to racing.

Concerned with the rising number of high-impact crashes resulting in driver injuries, Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Tony George began looking for a solution. The first application, a Polyethylene Energy Dissipating System -- or PEDS -- was designed by retired General Motors engineer John Pierce and placed on an interior wall near the entrance to pit road in 1998.

It received its first real test when Arie Luyendyk struck it at a high rate of speed during the International Race of Champions event later that season. It kept the driver from suffering serious injuries, but the barrier came apart under the stress of the crash, littering the track with pieces of plastic, creating a safety hazard for the other cars and requiring an extensive cleanup.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway was the first track with a SAFER barrier.

So George turned to Sicking, hoping the civil engineer could suggest a remedy. Sicking helped redesign the PEDS barrier and began work on his own design, putting crushable foam insulation behind a series of square steel tubes. By 2000, NASCAR had joined in the development of the project. And the first SAFER barriers were ready for installation at the Speedway in time for the 2002 Indianapolis 500.

The benefits were immediate, as no drivers suffered significant injuries as a result of contact with the SAFER barrier. NASCAR officials then went to Lincoln for a series of tests using heavier stock cars, and came away impressed. Within the next two years, nearly every track on the Cup schedule would have SAFER barriers at key locations.

"Every decade, there's a significant improvement in the level of understanding of energy management," Sicking said. "Basically controlling risk during crashes is an energy-management problem. Our knowledge and understanding of energy management today is a lot better than it was in 1998. And in 1998, it was a lot better than it was in 1988.

"It takes about eight to 10 years to get a significant improvement in technology. The SAFER barrier really helped us a lot in our program, in particular, in the analysis procedure we use to design barriers. It was a tremendous analysis problem to be able to design the SAFER barrier for impacts at the speeds and angles we were looking at in NASCAR. And that helped us learn a lot about doing analysis that we haven't been able to do in the past, in designing other barriers."

Since the SAFER barriers have been in place, Sicking said there has not been a fatality resulting from an incident with an outer wall barrier in any of NASCAR's three major series.

"We think the magnitude of the safety problem associated with outer wall barriers has been dramatically reduced," Sicking said. "Up until 2001 or 2002, the highest risk for a driver was striking the outer wall barrier at a high angle at high speed. That's no longer true."

And Sicking applauds the sanctioning body for taking safety seriously.

"NASCAR's doing the right thing," he said "They focused on the outer barrier because that was their biggest problem. It's now no longer their biggest problem, so they're studying the complete safety of their tracks to make sure they are focusing energy, resources and attention on solving the biggest safety problem, and car-to-car is certainly one of those. And that's with the [new car]."

Analyzing crash data

Autostock / Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

NASCAR hauls away wreckage such as the Michael McDowell crash and sends it to be anaylzed.

Sicking and his team designed the SAFER barriers, using state-of-the-art computer simulations and real-life tests. So in the case of McDowell's crash, Sicking said the first order of business is to determine the severity of the crash, particularly the amount of de-acceleration of the car when it hits the wall.

"When I get the data from NASCAR, I immediately analyze their data and determine the magnitude of the impact," Sicking said. "And we normally measure that in terms of delta-v during primary impact, meaning the change in velocity. So even though this vehicle was going about 160 mph at the time it struck the barrier, the velocity vector was not perpendicular to the barrier. In other words, his velocity toward the barrier was much less than that. In fact, it was about 70 mph toward the barrier."

Then Sicking compares the data from the actual incident with the computer simulation.

Safety first

From HANS to SAFER, NASCAR has come a long way in regards to safety. But as Joe Menzer writes, the process is ongoing.

• Complete story, click here
• Caraviello: New car safer

"At that magnitude of impact, we would ask, how much did the barrier crush and did it compare with our test results in simulations for the magnitude of that hit impact," Sicking said. "When we went back and looked at the degree of crush, and that's measured in a lot of ways -- the number of blocks that get destroyed and need to be replaced, evidence on the tires as to how far the tires went into the barrier -- we can tell from that how far the barrier got deformed.

"From all of that, we compare the predicted level of deformation to the actual level of deformation and we were very pleased that they compared very well. We're also extremely pleased that the driver walked away. It was a very hard hit."

The SAFER barrier's primary function is to limit excessive G-forces, the amount of acceleration caused by gravity -- in this case, centrifugal force playing a role. The lower the G-force, the more survivable the accident.

"Our goal is to keep that number down in the 40 G range or below, if possible," Sicking said. "During a real severe hit like this one, we would accept G-loading in the mid-to-upper 40s. That would not be surprising. In fact, in this case, the G-loading was kept below 40 and it was actually better than our test results for this level of impact severity. So we're very pleased at the barrier on the track appeared to be performing a little better that we predicted. We're always happy about that."

Sicking said the SAFER barriers are not flawless because there's no way to account for every possible outcome.

"Worse-case scenario can be beyond the current design limits," Sicking said. "We have to design for what we call the worst practical case. And the way you determine what the worst practical case is, you go back 10 years and you look at all the previous crashes during that time. This is what we did in 1998 when we first started this project. We looked at all of the crashes we could get our hands on between 1988 and 1998 -- and we identified the worst practical conditions that occurred during that period.

"We identified the delta-v from those crashes and picked the highest, and said, 'This is going to be our design parameter.' It would be the worst practical condition, the worst impact condition we had observed over the last 10 years, and we designed for that. I can construct a scenario that it would be impossible to design for."

From the raceway to the highway

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Track officials inspect the SAFER barrier after a 2007 crash at Daytona in the Gatorade Duel.

Sicking's ultimate goal is to improve roadside safety throughout the United States. And what Sicking and his team are learning about the SAFER barrier may be implemented very soon on a highway near you.

"We used a lot of the advanced techniques, in terms of modeling, that we carry into our design work for highways," Sicking said. "Then out of the technology we developed in designing barriers, it led to direct application to development of the new guard rail that is currently beginning to be widely implemented around the nation."

No fewer than 15 state departments of transportation, dozens of corporations and the U.S. Department of Transportation have a vested interest in what the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility develops.

"The design is totally different than the NASCAR barrier, but the modeling and simulation and analysis techniques developed during the process of designing the SAFER barrier helped us and enabled us to design this better guard rail. We believe all of the guard rails across the country will be built to this new design in the next five or six years. And we believe that will have a significant, measurable impact on fatalities on the highway."

And that doesn't mean Sicking is satisfied with the current configuration of the SAFER barrier. As always, there are advancements in technology and materials that can be applied.

"Right now, we continue to refine the design," Sicking said. "In any major safety application, the safety improvements come in large leaps, and then you nibble at the edges. Right now, we're nibbling at the edges. We're trying to improve the energy management in the foam blocks behind the barrier, particularly the energy absorbed during the more moderate, common impacts. If we can improve that, we think we can reduce the overall risk of injury to drivers. But in so doing, we want to make sure we don't reduce capacity for the really rare hit, the high-energy one that McDowell took a few weeks ago."

In addition, Sicking and his team are designing barriers for specific needs.

"The biggest focus for the SAFER barrier is making sure we can extend it to other areas of the track as necessary," Sicking said. "So we still are working on refinements to the barrier, attaching it to temporary concrete barriers. Some of these tracks have road courses on them. In that case, there are some cases where you need SAFER barriers in that location."

Every time a driver like Michael McDowell walks away from a serious crash, it validates the hard work and research being done by a group of civil engineers in Lincoln, Neb.