Tracking Safety; Three years after the death of Dale Earnhardt, NASCAR's research-and-development center is finding new ways to make race cars less deadly when things go wrong.

Publication: Newsweek

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Byline: Daniel McGinn

In auto racing, the most spectacular crashes usually happen during weekend contests at tracks surrounded by fans. But since last spring, some of NASCAR's most important collisions have taken place at low speeds behind a suburban office building near Charlotte, N.C. There, at NASCAR's year-old R&D Center, engineers are conducting tests to try to assure that fewer of those weekend smashups end in tragedy. "We take good stuff and turn it into junk," says R&D chief Gary Nelson, picking at a pile of twisted scraps his team tested recently. Walking inside the garage, Nelson points to a car featuring a thin aluminum driver's seat with no shoulder support. "Can you imagine racing in that today?" he asks, as if looking at an antique. But the seat in question was state-of-the-art...

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