Unwrapping NASCAR’s Growing Concussion Issue
The 2022 NASCAR season has brought along a lot of change, and not all of it has been good. From loose wheels and crew chief suspensions to flat tires and hard crashes, the transition to the Next Gen car hasn’t been a smooth one. As the playoffs carry on though, a more serious issue has now arisen… concussions.
As we all know, concussions have entered the spotlight more than ever over the last two decades in the sporting world, and NASCAR hasn’t been immune to it. With the introduction of the Next Gen car this year, drivers appear to be more at risk than ever before, as both Kurt Busch and Alex Bowman have now had to miss multiple races in the Cup Series due to concussions. Other drivers have suffered injuries as well, like Cody Ware, who was left with an impaction fracture on his ankle from his hard crash at Texas a few weeks ago.
This issue of safety and wellbeing has become such a massive concern that Denny Hamlin openly called for NASCAR to chuck the design for the Next Gen car in the bin and redo it from square one.
“The car needs to be redesigned; it needs a full redesign. It can still be called Next Gen, but it needs to be redesigned everywhere—front, middle, rear, competition. The whole thing needs to be redesigned. We’ve got a Martinsville race coming up and it’s going to be tough. This thing is going to be exposed about how bad the race is and that’s just part of it.”
Other drivers have expressed their concerns as well, especially after Alex Bowman became the second driver to suffer an accident that left the driver concussed. Below are two videos of the accident he had at Texas Motor Speedway (the same race that Ware suffered his injuries), one being from the live broadcast and the other being a breakdown from fellow driver Brad Keselowski.
Bowman said over the radio that it was the hardest hit he’d ever taken in a Cup car, raising concerns over the way these cars absorb impacts, especially from the rear. Last weekend, NASCAR announced that a new rear clip and rear bumper structure would undergo crash tests to see if improvements can be made in the design. However, Dale Earnhardt Jr. – along with many others – have directed a lot of the blame toward the massive foam headrests that are used.
Below is a new clip from the latest episode of The Dale Jr. Download where Earnhardt gets into why he believes the headrests are presenting such an issue in these cars.
Between losing both his own career and his father to head and neck injuries suffered from accidents while racing, I’d like to think Dale Jr. knows a thing or two about topics like these, so I found his “less is more” take interesting, and I hope you do too. My biggest hope though is that a resolution can be found and we can stop holding our breath everytime we see a car spinning out on a mile-and-a-half track or superspeedway.