Hard-Hitting Information ; CART can teach NASCAR about the value of crash data recorders.(Brief Article)

After four fatalities in the past two seasons, NASCAR has taken considerable heat for what critics say is a stubborn and insular approach to safety. The three hot spots: failure to appoint a full-time medical officer; a reluctance to embrace head and neck restraints; the lack of onboard crash data recorders.

Those three solutions were easy for the critics to identify, because in other forms of racing they're old news. They've been in Indy cars for years, and CART can take a large share of the credit for pioneering their development.

To be fair, NASCAR has now taken a tentative first step toward a full-time medical director with the creation of its ``medical liaison'' post. And it must be said that if NASCAR had made head restraints fully mandatory, it would have been the first: HANS will not be required in CART or F1 until 2002. (In CART, HANS is currently required only on ovals. At Vancouver this past week, fully half the field chose not to wear the device.) And to its credit, NASCAR has finally accepted onboard crash data recorders, beginning next year at Daytona-nine seasons after they were first used in Indy cars.

According to CART medical director Steve Olvey, the data recorder plays a crucial role in his entire approach to safety. ``In 1993 we were approached by General Motors to install crash data recorders in our cars. Ford took over the program in 1996 and we've worked closely with them ever since. We've been able to build a large database in a relatively short time that allows us to understand how all the injuries occur and develop solutions that work,'' Olvey says.

Says Ford Racing safety engineer Craig Wetzel, ``We're able to take the raw data and using our computer models we can learn what both the car and the driver went through, even the belt loads.'' Although the ``blue box'' has developed a high-tech cachet for all the knowledge it has generated, in reality the box itself is a relatively simple device, manufactured by Instrumented Sensor Technology, an Okemos, Michigan, firm that builds virtually identical devices for the package shipping industry.

Inside a sturdy four by four by two-inch aluminum box installed under the seat is a thumbnail-sized triaxial piezo-accelerometer, a signal filter and amplifier and 512 kilobytes of memory. Whenever the unit is powered up, it monitors the car's velocity in three directions-longitudinal, lateral and vertical-constantly ...