Safer Barriers - NASCAR.com

/Home/NASCAR Safety/NASCAR SAFER Barriers

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. "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.