Safety has been a hot topic in Sprint Car racing of late, and it appears that isn’t going to change anytime soon.
During Friday’s World of Outlaws NOS Energy Drink Sprint Car Series main event at River Cities Speedway, a pair of incidents occurred, the second of which brought the issue back to the forefront.
Brendan Mullen’s car flipped off the backstretch and got wedged in the top of the catch fence near the pit area. Mullen was OK, but the car was jammed in pretty tight on top of a pole, and it would have taken a significant delay to get out.
Track and World of Outlaws officials made the decision to complete the last 24 laps of the main event with the car stuck on the top of the fence. It didn’t take long for word to spread throughout the Sprint Car community, and safety concerns and scrutiny followed on various social media outlets.
“I’m sure Carlton [Reimers] and Mike [Hess] got together with the track and said, ‘Let’s finish this and take it down the right way,’” World Racing Group Chief Operating Officer Tom Deery said in an interview with SprintCarUnlimited.com. “They had to get equipment [crane or lull] in to get it down. It took a couple of hours to get it.
“In that set of circumstances, I was perfectly fine with the decision. Knowing how far back that fence is and the strength of what the rest of the fence was, the fence wasn’t compromised. So, I thought it was the right thing to do. It was primarily to protect the guy’s equipment.”
Officials did ask Mullen’s team if it was OK to leave the car in the fence until after the 40-lap A-Main was complete. The team agreed.
A group of drivers, including Brent Marks, were standing next to their cars during the red flag. They were surprised when World of Outlaws Race Director Mike Hess told them to get ready to finish the event.
“We were all standing on the track, and Mike came around and was like, ‘Get back in, we’re going racing,’” Marks said. “We were like, ‘You’re going to leave the car in the fence?’ He was like, ‘This is for real.’
“Yeah, I don’t know. I guess the insurance at the track doesn’t care about that stuff, so that’s on them. I mean, I would be like, ‘That’s dumb.’ Then again, I guess they didn’t have a way to get the car down, so what do you do? I probably wouldn’t have run it with that car there if I was in charge of it.”
Daryn Pittman was running in the top five at the time and stopped at the other end of the speedway. He admitted that he didn’t even know why the red flag was thrown, much less what was transpiring with Mullen’s car.
It wasn’t until 30 minutes after the race that Pittman, who never looked out toward the fence while idling or racing around the speedway, walked out of his trailer, looked up and saw the car stuck at the top of the backstretch catch fence.
“The biggest issue is that wall where the car was, you can hit the bottom of it pretty good,” Pittman said. “If one of those poles breaks, you have a car get dislodged and fall 30 feet on top of you.
“I think the fact that it was a local car played into their decision. If that was an Outlaw car, I mean, you can’t just leave it up there. Looking at it, I’m not sure that car couldn’t have rejoined the race if they could’ve gotten it down.
“Truthfully, what other decision could they have done other than to take a really, really long time to get it down, but I’m not sold on the decision that we needed to keep racing with that up there. I don’t think that was the smartest decision.”
There has been a heightened concern over safety of late, which was one of the key factors to the formation of the Sprint Car Council. The group includes track promoters and owners, teams, drivers, and series officials, including the World of Outlaws.
The World Racing Group, the governing body of the World of Outlaws Sprint Car and Late Model Series, also has owner’s meetings. According to Marks and Pittman, River Cities has been discussed as a place that needs safety upgrades, some of which are major from a financial standpoint.
Pittman indicated that the two flips on Friday night will only add to the discussion about the speedway, and depending on the outcome of those talks, could affect the future of World of Outlaws events at the speedway.
“Do I feel racing with that car up there was the biggest safety concern at the track, no,” Pittman said. “Not at all. If we fight that place — I guarantee it will be done now with both incidents that happened.
“Honestly, it’s almost like a ‘Not-return-to track.’ It sucks because it’s such a huge fan base, but they don’t have problems that can be addressed easily. That place needs a fence put around it. That would be a massive undertaking and huge expense, so the problems that track faces are pretty substantial in terms of expense.
“I think [those issues] are going to be addressed a whole hell of a lot more now, and I don’t know how they are going to take it. Did going back racing with that car up there make me feel any more unsafe than I do there already, no. That place has too many other areas that are far more likely to be a problem than a car up there.”