Yesterday, having expressed my disgust with the “Ferkel” incident on these pages in sufficiently forthright fashion, I provided R&T with a less furious version of my opinions on the subject.
In a sane world, the discussions in response to that article might have included questions like, “Should an event that gathers more than a quarter-million dollars’ worth of entry fees have all the flag stations manned?” or “Is it really a great idea to let people race against 169 other cars on a tricky pro-level track when they’ve never done so much as take a one-day NASA HPDE session?” In this world, it degenerated into “FUCK JACK BARUTH AND I’M SO GLAD HE WAS IN A CAR CRASH AND HE’S NOT WELCOME TO RACE NEXT TO ME BECAUSE HE’S TOO WORRIED ABOUT GAY-ASS SAFETY AND STUFF.”
Last night I stayed up a bit past my bedtime and wondered: Why should I even care about safety in LeMons? I don’t have any plans to run anything besides NASA, SCCA, or AER in the foreseeable future. Why should I care if these idiots run into each other? What difference does it make to me if a bunch of people who self-select into being career participants in what is fundamentally a non-competitive race series don’t have flag coverage or safe driving standards or even a reasonable number of vehicles on track with them? There’s also the fact that every time I sound the alarm for more safety in driver’s ed or LeMons, R&T suffers a series of troll attacks from people who profit, financially or otherwise, from the current state of affairs. To quote the Big Dog, my old business partner and spiritual advisor: Is this the hill I want to die on?
It was this post by Justin Howe that settled my opinion. It’s not that I used to consider this guy a friend, or at least an acquaintance, and that I’ve tried to help and promote his writing in the past. It’s not that I’m particularly shocked by the LOLZ THE KID COULD HAVE DIED approach he took; that’s been a staple of my detractors for two years now. Rather, it’s the fact that he is correct, after a fashion.
I didn’t need to be on that road that day. I didn’t need to have my son on the road with me that day. I didn’t need to have my passenger on the road with me that day. But I did, and I did it because I had twenty-seven years of flawless avoidance in miserable Ohio weather to my credit. For nearly three decades I never even considered not driving in deep snow or ice or sub-freezing conditions because I had never made a serious mistake in those conditions. In fact, I thought I was pretty good at handling high-speed loss of traction… and I was. When I hit a patch of ice at 45mph in a turn, I kept the Town Car on the narrow road through two full left-right oscillations without stability control only to get hit in the door because I was still on said road.
And it was that confidence that led to my decision to take that rural road in the dead of winter. I didn’t stop to think about whether it was a good idea to be out there at all. I didn’t ask myself if the trip was necessary. I didn’t consider whether there were things I could have done to reduce the risk, from waiting until the weather was better to simply slowing to 25mph or so for each turn regardless of what I thought I saw ahead.
I was confident that nothing bad could happen, because nothing bad had ever happened to me in those conditions.
That’s blindness.
The same kind of blindness that affects everybody who thinks that running 170 cars full of untrained drivers at high speeds around a partially un-flagged track won’t get anybody killed because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s the blindness that occurs when you are too emotionally involved with a situation to take a rational look at the risks.
The fact of the matter is that had the Trump Miata been punted at a slightly different angle, the impact from Eyesore could have killed or paralyzed its driver. The fact of the matter is that there is no excuse for locking up and hitting something that you can see happening maybe two hundred feet away. This graphic is going around right now and if you have any serious training or experience it will make you sick to your stomach:
If you don’t understand that solving problems like that is part of a driver’s job, you don’t have much business racing.
So here’s my decision. I am going to campaign for safety. For the safety of driver’s education participants. For the safety of cheap-car racers who have no experience with or knowledge of best practices in amateur racing. For the safety of novices whose first experience on a racetrack comes in a Class C LeMons car thrown into the middle of what is basically an Improved Touring “E” race.
I am going to ask uncomfortable questions: about flagging, about safety equipment, about maximum permitted speeds. I am going to call out dangerous behavior whenever and wherever I see it. I am going to do my best to bring the discussion to a broader audience. There isn’t much that anybody can do to stop me. They can get me fired from R&T. They can doxx me, harass me, make fun of me, try to knock me down or humiliate or upset me. They can ban me from their race series. I don’t really care.
I am going to do my part to fix this mess. I am not content to sit back and do nothing while people make hundreds of thousands of dollars by cutting corners in for-profit trackday and race organizations. And the reason I’m doing it is simple: because I don’t want anyone else to go through what happened to me last January. I don’t want anyone else to see their loved ones in a hospital or injured or maimed because everybody was too blind to see the problem right in front of them.
It will cost me money and time and friends and who knows what else, but I’m not going to just drop the subject and move on. We can do better. All of us. We can make DEs and trackdays and races safer. All that is required is that we give a damn about it.
Those of you who are reading and want to know what you can do to help: it’s simple. Just forward me information on any incident you witness or read about. In turn, I’ll be communicating that information to the already-established working group of senior flaggers, officials, and racers who are building a database of contact and injury incidents across the country. Together, we can improve the situation. And if you think it doesn’t need improving… well, that’s something you will have to live with, eventually.
See the same with firearms. Tons of bad practice that is actually considered awesome because nobody has been killed yet. Almost always put forward by people who think they’re super high speed and super warrior, but have no idea how actual elite warriors are trained and prepared for combat.
Stuff like this:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LTCFxU2fxXI/hqdefault.jpg
They react pretty much the same way when the flaws in their approach are pointed out because of ego and emotional investment.
I’d go sound the range officer alarm myself and stop that kind of lunacy.
If you don’t police yourself, you get the government to come in and police you. The price of freedom being vigilance is not just the need to mount up and kill some foreign aggressor - it’s to prevent softly subsiding into having to have a nanny state because you’re such a liability left to your own devices, which is an everyday thing.
I need to believe that this was done under controlled conditions for purposes of photography only and that every person facing the (photo) shooter has a cleared and double verified weapon.
I’m trying to think what Naish or Chuck Taylor would say in a situation like that.
I can understand the need….but in fact it was done in a level 1 handgun course. The students were using loaded weapons and fired at the targets immediately to the left and right of the photographer…who was also one of the instructors of the course.
You can see video here:
https://youtu.be/sAdemRhuHDg
The perpetrators defended their actions in the video by claiming that when they just put the camera on a tripod downrange, students would sometimes shoot the tripod. Ponder that for a second.
Elite law enforcement and military units do perform “downrange” training that has living people in close proximity to targets that are going to be shot with live ammo, but that sort of training doesn’t happen haphazardly. There is a lot careful selection, preparation, and prior training before that sort of thing takes place and even then it only takes place under very careful controls. And even with all the careful planning, coordination, controls, and with expert medical attention on immediate standby people are seriously injured and killed in the training.
To quote Ken Hackathorn, training with firearms is inherently dangerous.
The more high speed you try to get with it, the more inherently dangerous it becomes.
Same would apply to racing. Everybody wants to be like Schumacher or Senna without understanding all the preparation and calculation that formed the foundation of their displays on the track. Everybody wants to go fast and be competitive and feel the good feels of racing and to validate their ego. They care about driving, dammit, and they want to be GOOD. And they want to prove it.
Risk analysis gets overlooked and ignored. Real racers take risks, right? The fact that real racers will take calculated risks because something truly valuable is on the line (money, a championship that pays millions, a shot at a good ride in a race series that pays big bucks) and generally the successful ones in the long term don’t take stupid risks when nothing serious is at stake doesn’t really figure into the equation.
It’s an unfortunate feature of human nature that we tend to think that nothing really bad has happened YET means that nothing bad is going to happen.
The only way to change it is to keep throwing out good sense. It won’t take with everybody. In fact, a sizeable chunk of people will be as hostile and mean-spirited as if you told them their mama sells it on the street for two bucks. Some, however, will listen and it will change their thinking on the matter. It changes how they approach the endeavor and they, in turn, will eventually influence others.
It’s not instant but it is effective. The best you can hope for is to create more people who think through the circumstances critically and then limit their possibility of being maimed or killed. It won’t do everybody good, but there will be those who avoid a bad outcome because they heeded some wisdom and maybe prevent a couple of other someones from experiencing the bad thing too.
Wholesale change…not so much.
I’ll close with a morbid observation from friends of mine in the combat arena:
Changes in SOP are usually written in blood.
And those are the people who’ll eventually get them banned/severely limited…
Sigh, the little pill of a bit of extra regulation could fix with little trouble, but then people keep putting it off till it ends in envasive surgery…
Check out the American Alpine Club’s “Accidents in North American Mountaineering”
I was going to suggest the same thing to Jack. The American Alpine Club has been doing this for decades, and it has served to educate and improve the entire climbing community.
There also used to be a mailing list out of Stanford, as I recall, that did failure analysis of major catastrophic manmade events, but I have no idea where to find it now, or even if it is still being done.
But the key in both of those cases is that they didn’t limit themselves to one organization, site or setup. They covered the whole waterfront, and were beholden to no one, and hence could call things just as they saw them.
But it sounds like Jack is moving in that direction already. I just wanted to add my two cents that that seems like the most likely to succeed path to take.
Done right, there may not be any reason or need to die on any hill.
And I hope R&T has enough foresight and intestinal fortitude to appreciate that it has someone who is more than just an observer on its staff. And if they doxx you, they need to be careful, because sometimes people doxx the doxxers, especially if they feel that the original doxxers are using it to suppress free speech rather than stupidity.
If anything, I would hope that a haxxor organization that claims to try to better the world, would work to support your goals, rather than undermine them, a la some of the Anonymous actions and their claimed motivations.
Good luck, Jack. What you are trying to do is a noble and lofty goal. And as such, you are going to run into a lot of inertia. Just remember, non illegitimi carborundum…don’t let the bastards grind you down.
The take away I have from that picture with the stupid “Choose Wisely” - if you can’t process all that information, you shouldn’t be in that situation.
Perhaps racing around little ovals would be better for somebody complaining about all the information coming in? No hills, no chicanes, no turning right - at least you cut out half of the things in that picture you have to process.
This is another thing I see with firearms. When you hand someone new to firearms a handgun and try to instruct them on the fundamentals some people take to it immediately. Others struggle. Just about everyone, however, begins to degrade severely when placed under even a small amount of stress like a timed standard or having to pay 20 bucks to the winner of a drill.
There’s a certain mental bandwidth that is developed with rigorous training which prepares someone to handle a situation at speed. People who don’t have this training struggle to understand how an elite handgun shooter can actually see his/her sights and fire six or perhaps even seven aimed shots *in a second*. The unprepared mind, except perhaps an abnormally talented one, just sees a blur of motion and noise. The trained mind has learned to see what it needs to see at those speeds to make the hits, and the body has been trained to do what it needs to do to correctly manipulate the weapon under those circumstances.
To become a top level parachute instructor you have to simulate a certain number of chute failures on jumps. To become a fighter pilot you have to be put through many hours in simulators where you are confronted with the worst possible circumstances and have to manage the problem effectively. When the military trains people in response to penetrating trauma they will cut open a pig’s femoral and the trainee has to actually successfully stop a major arterial bleed on a living thing so that they aren’t doing it for the first time when a Lance Corporal’s life is on the line.
The problem I think Jack is hitting on here is that allowing people to be in these circumstances without that process of preparation is negligent and will guarantee disaster. Enthusiasm often overrides judgment, especially to the sort of person who is inclined to attempt incompetently something they see highly trained people doing successfully.
The person who watches me fire six shots in a second may think I’m just pointing in the general direction of the target and whacking on the trigger as fast as possible…but when they try that and find that they’re lucky to hit paper while I’ve fired a nice tight group they start to understand there’s a lot more going on there than they realized.
For most people, merely driving a car at high speeds requires a great deal of mental bandwidth because they are unaccustomed to doing that. Throw in other cars and people who were already out of their depth are now in great peril.
And let’s not forget that even the elite professionals don’t have nearly as many cars on the track than you see at one of these events…and a chunk of elite professionals will still hit something when there’s a snarl of cars going unexpected ways at high speed because of accident circumstances.
Only there are fewer cars.
And those cars are built from the ground up for racing safety.
There are no shortcuts on this stuff. Trying to take them anyway often results in tragedy.
I used to shoot pins and the number of people I’d see unleash a few rounds at the floor, or the ceiling, when the buzzer went off…
Godspeed.
Yay Jack ! .
You’re bang on as usual because : it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt .
Sadly I have been there when folks get crippled for life or have died , it’s sobering to say the least .
Looking at that range picture makes me cringe ~ there are NO ‘ gun grabbers ‘ only fools like that one who will get our Firearms taken away eventually because they’re so damn stupid .
-Nate
Every year at the Detroit Grand Prix, Indycar won’t give me trackside photography access because I’ve never worked a big race like that before. Catch-22. If there aren’t entry level forms of racing, how will people learn?
Perhaps the organizers should insist on some form of driver training, but even HPDE isn’t going to teach you how to drive and race with other cars on the track.
If crapcan racing is that big of a thing, it might be worthwhile to start a driving school aimed at the specific market. Keep things cheaper than Barber and Bondurant, with a focus on the real world of cheap endurance racing.
Racing today is safer at least in part due to guys like Jackie Stewart who pressed for safer tracks and safer cars. Unfortunately, with human nature the way it is, it usually take some kind of tragedy involving death to get us to take action. How many drivers used the HANS device before Dale Earnhardt Sr’s death (though I tend to believe that his death had more to do with not using his seat belts properly than a lack of neck protection)?
Training is paramount to avoiding most wrecks. You have to have some natural ability, but training trumps experience every time. And the benefits are also realized on the street. I have avoided wrecks, most recently 3 weeks ago, due to advanced driving school training. I’m overdue for a refresher, as it’s been about 10 years since my last school. And as I age, I notice my reaction time is slowing which sucks. I also take an advanced rider course around the same time, as I tend to get into bad/lax habits on my bike. I’m starting my 59th trip around the sun, and would like to have a few more.
A worthy quest!
@ Dirty Dingus McGee ;
Yes and no ~ I’ve had lots and lots of professional training but I never had the driving gift my Son was born with .
He’s safe and fast on the track , me i have my fun elsewhere when there’s no one else on the road , i don’t go all that fast no matter what some will tell you .
It’s a good if sad thing I know I’ll never be a ‘ Race Car Driver ‘ but at least I don’t wad them up on the road .
-Nate
Nate
Perhaps I should have clarified my opinion a bit more. Natural ability is a gift people have in a particular endeavor, we all have it for something. For the rest of us normal schlub’s, driver training trumps experience. I know I would be far worse off without the training.
@Dirty Dingus McGee ;
_Absolutely_ correct ! .
I too have much driver training , more the Professional/Commercial kind , I still stay off the track because I know I’m not that good .
Sad but true .
-Nate
I wonder if Jackie Stewart got this much flack when he started campaigning for better safety in F1?
It took the death of his teammate & friend Francois Cevert RIP
And then we have Senna dying which triggered more safety measures
Do we always need someone to die, before people take notice?
Jackie Stewart was vilified for YEARS. They called him every name in the book. The abuse that the Lemons racers are heaping on me (and, occasionally, Charley) has nothing on what they did to Stewart. He wasn’t welcome in the paddock.
Jack - I would think more LeMons participants would be rallying around you. This is pretty basic common sense. An incident, where thankfully no one got seriously hurt – is being pointed out as a warning / wake up call.
LeMons is a great series that makes racing accessible. Is the fear that additional training would make it cost prohibitive?
I think it’s a combination of ignorance, insecurity, and inexperience. The fact that at least five LeMons “racers” in a public discussion group, including the owner of the car, felt that the 911 should be excused from fault because “his wheels were locked” is frightening. In LeMons world, if your wheels are locked under braking it’s because you don’t have ABS and NOTHING CAN BE DONE.
I mentioned that I was a LeMons overall winner in the beginning of my R&T article to deflect criticism that I wasn’t “one of them”. But all that did was piss off the various pogues who run in the bottom fifty percent of the race group and have been doing so for nearly a decade.
Nobody likes change. That’s doubly true when, as is the case with many of these people, you have built your entire personal identity and life around a particular race series that could CHANGE and impact your enjoyment or participation. All the people who run 75-horsepower vintage cars are afraid they’ll be kicked out for safety. All the people who run 300-horsepower cheater cars are afraid they’ll be kicked out for safety. Everybody in between is afraid they’ll be exposed to criticism for their lack of talent.
Ron Checca said it best. Even a minimal level of training could have prevented that accident. The reason the LeMons people are angry is because they know that their lack of skill contributes to accidents. They also know they’re being milked for cash and they resent it when I point that out, as well.
I’ve watched someone die at LeMons. And yeah, I heard the official story afterwards. But I was there and I saw the impact with my own eyes. I’m anxious that it not happen to someone else. Even if that someone is a piece of shit who uses my concern about safety as an excuse to attempt to humiliate the woman who was the passenger in my January crash.
Jack,
For what it’s worth, a member of LeMons brass has said that “the character assassination being heaped” on you is uncool, and defended your right to express your opinion. That sentiment has been echoed or approved by some of the most experienced LeMons racers.
When I decided to stir discussion about this, I took the risk that people would take a few swings at me. I’ve spoken to the people who decided to “have it out” with Charley and with any luck their ire is focused back on me, where it belongs.
Assuming the Nein-11 didn’t have situational awareness of what might be approaching from behind on his right, and given the short amount of time to chose a move, why wasn’t following the car ahead off to the left his best option?
Yeah, if it had turned too hard and rolled, burning off a lot of speed fast, he MIGHT have faced a collision with it. But it still seems like his best move to my inexperienced @ss.
This is what the crash looked like to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4wAM2CJkQ
I’m with you all the way for improving protocols, improving vigilance, improving the ladder, and doing everything to preclude situations like this. The idea of reserving high-speed tracks for drivers with one or more previous races has merit. However, I hope you will take it as constructive criticism that ‘sufficiently forthright’ has opened up a lot of counterproductive argument. Your gut reaction to ban the drivers would have a vanishingly small effect. The direction needs to be visible from 10,000 feet.
In the LeMons crash, I think part of the cause was the time it takes to see and comprehend how fast or slow something is coming at you. Were there better options than what played out? The further out from the situation we are, the more options we have. ‘The fact of the matter is that there is no excuse for locking up and hitting something that you can see happening maybe two hundred feet away.’ I respect your opinions, but I disagree. There but for the grace of God go I.
I probably turned the dial a little too far. I’m used to dealing with fellow racers who are unstinting in their praise and criticism. The LeMons crew just doesn’t have that same mentality, because the racing isn’t the same and they don’t race for the same reasons.
With that said, I continue to think that the 911 driver made a thoroughly avoidable mistake there. It’s something that a trained driver wouldn’t do.
I was going to offer to demonstrate this point through some sort of stunt (driving around a track with random foam blocks placed over blind hills?) but at this point there’s nothing I can do that these people won’t take as personal criticism of their way of life.
There’s a certain percentage of people — let’s call it “ninety-five percent” who are simply unable to admit to themselves that they have ever made a mistake. I’ve spent my life trying to be honest with myself about my failings but I’m not in the majority there. Nor, it must be said, am I always successful.
I don’t think it’s that most people aren’t willing to accept that they’ve made a mistake- it’s that everyone wants to believe their mistakes are acceptable. Everyone is human, sure, but for some accepting that others’ abilities to not make the mistakes they would make does indeed preclude them from some activities and situations is the hard part from what I can tell.
Having slept on it, another thing might be ‘Minimum Speed 45mph’, sustained in a straight line, obviously. Just like the interstates, where such a low speed is already horrifically dangerous. It quantifies the ‘get off the racing surface and get a tow’ decision.