CUP: NASCAR’s Airborne Accidents

Sprint Cup

CUP: NASCAR’s Airborne Accidents

Taking flight on track is high on emotion, hard on drivers...

SceneDaily.com | Posted December 14, 2010 Charlotte, NC

The No. 12 Penske Dodge, driven by Brad Keselowski goes airborne during the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 7, 2010 in Hampton, Georgia. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Article by Kris Johnson, scenedaily.com

Fear is the nastiest four-letter word in NASCAR.

Talk with drivers about it – if you can even get them to talk – and you’ll usually end up in the same place you started: nowhere.

High-speed airborne wrecks, by their very nature, should inspire fear. Then again, most competitors will insist walking away from spectacular wrecks such as Brad Keselowski's frightening crash at Atlanta in March merely represents a hazard that comes with the job – and that no fear lingers afterward.

The driver that was sent flipping and nose-diving into the Atlanta asphalt? Well, he’ll tell you differently.

Keselowski believes he cheated death.

“Hell yeah, I do. Absolutely,” Keselowski says. “It takes the perfect sequence of events to get hurt or, worse, killed in a race car. But it happens.”

Don’t expect a rehash of Keselowski’s feud with Carl Edwards , because we’re dealing with the essence of the airborne experience – what it feels like and how it affects the athletes.

Keselowski has seen the replay of his thrill ride (“probably a dozen times, maybe more,” he says), and he isn’t afraid to discuss the mental dynamics associated with it. This makes him not only refreshing but also an aberration inside the garage area.

“There’s not one definable emotion that you have with something like that; there’s a bunch of them that play off of each other,” he says. “From the subconscious feelings where you realize what you’re doing, and is it worth putting yourself at risk? You’ve only got one life to live. So you have to go back to that chain of emotions.

“Is the lifestyle I chose worth it?”

Keselowski asked himself that question repeatedly after his wild ride at Atlanta and never came up with no as the answer.

But some fear remained.

“Subconsciously,” Keselowski admits, “and the only way to get rid of it is to get back in the car as quickly as possible.”

The wrecked No. 12 Penske Dodge, driven by Brad Keselowski, sits in the garage after an incident on track during the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway on March 7, 2010 in Hampton, Georgia. (Photo: Getty Images)

Keselowski’s crash was seen by millions, but the worst airborne wreck of Elliott Sadler’s career is one you’ve likely never seen. It occurred during practice at Michigan in 2000 and prepared Sadler for the mayhem he experienced three years later at Talladega.

Sadler says it was there in the fall of 2003 that he swerved to avoid a late block attempt by Dale Earnhardt Jr.., who was bidding for a fifth straight victory at the Alabama track known for its aerial displays. Sadler cut across the nose of Kurt Busch's car and then found himself sailing through the air.

“All of a sudden, it was very quiet,” Sadler says. “I was airborne, and I was looking down at the pavement. When things start to happen that quick and the car goes silent, what I learned from my first flip in 2000 was just to get in a fetal position, keep my arms and hands real close and just kind of ride it out. Because there’s nothing you can do as a driver.”

Nothing but prepare to be pummeled and accept your fate, whatever it might be. The hits just kept on coming that day for Sadler.

“It’s almost like being in a boxing ring with a heavyweight boxer,” says Sadler, who would flip again in 2004 at Talladega. “He just started giving you body blows. It seemed like every time you hit the ground, you lost a little bit of air. The next thing you know, you’ve hit six or seven times pretty hard and you’re out of air.”

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