To document the history of auto racing safety, a National Geographic film crew came to Wayne State University's Bioengineering Research Center one day early this month. The one-hour film feature, scheduled to be aired sometime next year, will use extensive interviews with WSU Bioengineering Professor John Melvin to weave a story line tracing the development of racecar auto safety, said Laura Netscher, a producer with Vanness Films, a Venice, California film production company hired by National Geographic.

In 1999, the death of Gonzalo Rodriguez in a CART race at Laguna Seca in California, 'really shocked Indy style racecar drivers because they realized they were vulnerable,' Melvin told Netscher on camera. In early 2001, public attention to racecar safety took off with the death of popular NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt at the Daytona 500.

Melvin uses videotapes and on-board crash recorder data from racecar crashes to study and improve safety equipment. He says Indy style cars with tight cockpits and highly contoured and padded seats are more protective than the open cockpits of stock and sports racing cars. Developing seats, netting and restraint systems for stock and sports cars that resemble the closed nature of the Indy cars is the key to better safety in stock car and sports car racing. That and the use by drivers of head/neck restraints such as the HANS device will save lives, he says.

Without head/neck restraints, which control forward motion of the head relative to the highly restrained torso in frontal crashes, the drivers have basically been relying on the steering wheel to catch their helmeted head before dangerous loads can develop in the neck. When the head misses the steering wheel due to the nature of the crash, fatal head/neck injuries can occur if the crash is of a severe nature.

Today's multi-point restraint systems with double shoulder straps hold the body so well that the acceleration of the head, which cannot be as easily restrained, has become the leading cause of death in racecar crashes. Earnhardt, Rodriguez, and many other drivers killed in recent years died from basal skull fractures, caused in frontal collisions, usually with fixed objects like the walls, when the body is stationary and the head whips forward, snapping the neck.

The National Geographic crew also interviewed HANS device creator Robert Hubbard at the Bioengineering Research Center. Melvin has been running tests at Wayne State to improve the HANS device, which acts in tandem to the shoulder and seat belts to restrain the head during a frontal collision.

With the work by Melvin, Hubbard and others in auto racing safety, the risk in auto racing has improved. Yet danger is the nature of the sport. "Mostly in life, we are controlled by machines," says Melvin. "But in racecar driving, the driver is pushing the envelope. It's the driver and his ability that are in control. It's an interesting battle between man and machine."