Like an unwelcome journey into NASCAR's difficult past

I hate Talladega Superspeedway.

I've hated it ever since the first race I ever saw there, in the fall of 2001, when Bobby Labonte went rolling down the backstretch on the final lap and everyone just accepted it as a matter of course.

I hate it because it gives me this tight, uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that does not go away until all 43 drivers slide out of their cars and walk away. I hate it because from Bobby Allison to Rusty Wallace to Elliott Sadler to Carl Edwards, vehicles have been going airborne there and no one seems to really know how to stop them. I hate it because it's a place that glorifies spectacular accidents and near-death experiences, no matter how much people say they really love it for the racing.

I hate it because it's the one track on the NASCAR circuit that panders to the lowest common denominator of race fan, and this past Sunday afternoon it was at it again. There was Ryan Newman, flipping into the air and landing upside down and sliding on his roof and needing several long minutes to be extricated from his crushed race car, all for your viewing pleasure. Thanks to the great God in heaven that he was not hurt, or the vehicle was not on fire, or there was not some other threatening circumstance that would have mandated a hastier exit. Yes, a pesky thing like a serious injury would have ruined all the fun.

I hate Talladega because to me it seems the last vestige of the bad old days of NASCAR, when the sport was slow to adapt to safety advances, when drivers who wore head-and-neck restraints were mocked my their more macho counterparts in the garage area, when the series was considerably more perilous than it is today.

I hate Talladega because it seems to give license to the kind of flying-through-the-air crashes that should not happen anymore, because it provides cute euphemisms like the "Big One" that excuse needless mechanical carnage, because it allows NASCAR to try and blame driver behavior for events on a track that's been tossing cars around like pick-up sticks for 40 years now.

But most of all, I hate the risk. Goodness, I deplore it. I know full well that no NASCAR driver has been killed at Talladega since the great Tiny Lund lost his life in a T-bone accident in 1975, and that in terms of raw numbers Daytona and Indianapolis—the two foremost shrines of the sport—have proven far more deadly.

Fatal accidents can occur on any kind of race track, and it's a testament to NASCAR's renewed effort to safety that the sport's national divisions have been free of such incidents for more than seven years now. And yet, Talladega is the one place where the series most flirts with disaster. In the spring, we were lucky that not more than seven fans were hurt when Edwards' car went spinning into the fence. Sunday, we were lucky that Kevin Harvick's hood broke Newman's fall. How much longer will that luck hold out?

I hate Talladega because it seems a track beyond anyone's control. The place is an unruly beast, and has been since its first race, which was boycotted by many top drivers over safety concerns. Ever since, NASCAR has tried to reign it in—with restrictor plates, with higher catchfences, with yellow-line penalties, with mandates against bump-drafting. Check out the highlights from the final five laps Sunday to see how all that worked out.

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Talladega is a track where drivers swallow a little harder, hug their wives a little tighter, and just try to gut it out. In the end some of them rightfully seethe over the fact that they're asked to compete on a venue that's beyond reasoning with, all in the hopes of putting on a good show.

Now, let's be clear. Some of the best people in the sport work at Talladega, and this is no indictment against them. This has nothing to do with the fish camps on Coosa Lake, the caverns over in Childersburg, the soldiers stationed in Anniston, the Alabama Gang, Bear Bryant, or anything else in the Heart of Dixie but one 2.66-mile triangle of real estate that has a bad habit of flipping cars end-over-end.

This also is no condemnation of NASCAR's commitment to safety, which is embodied in the kind of next-generation vehicle that might have saved Newman's life Sunday. Likely no one was more aghast to see Newman's car go airborne, its roof flaps clearly deployed, than the engineers at the Research and Development Center whose job it is to prevent such things from happening. But up against Talladega, even they can do only so much.

A little perspective here. I began covering this sport in 2000, when a culture of machismo dominated the garage area and safety devices were often seen as for the frightened or the meek. Reporters would actually keep running tallies of how many drivers used head-and-neck restraining devices, which were so rare you could count them just by walking down pit road.

The next few years were devastating—Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin, Tony Roper and Dale Earnhardt were all killed in on-track accidents, and Steve Park, Jeff Purvis and Jerry Nadeau suffered critical, life-altering injuries. A pall enveloped the sport. There were not-outlandish fears about Congressional hearings. Anyone involved with NASCAR at that time remembers the grieving families, remembers the shattered lives, remembers that frigid morning under a tent in Rockingham, N.C., when officials began to try to explain why Earnhardt died.

It is impossible to be close to a situation like that and not have it affect you. No, none of those aforementioned crashes happened at Talladega—they occurred at places like Loudon and Texas and Richmond and Nazareth. And NASCAR is a much more proactive and professional organization because of those experiences, which thrust the series into a harsh national spotlight and all but forced it to change.

But to me, every trip to Talladega feels like an unwelcome journey back into 2000 or 2001, when accidents with the potential to be disastrous were shrugged off as just part of the deal, and safety took a back seat to the show. Even now, I'm getting e-mails that convey not shock and horror over Newman's crash, but claim that Sunday's race was too boring. They don't like all the rules, they don't like the new car, they don't like the restrictor plates. They want more action. And why not? They've been conditioned to get it. Never mind that whole guy-landing-on-his-roof thing.

News flash: when it comes to Talladega, I couldn't care less about boring. They could run single-file under caution for 188 laps and it wouldn't bother me a bit. I want cars to stop flipping up in the air. I want this almost pornographic celebration of vehicular violence to cease. I want television networks to quit using clips of gruesomely spectacular Talladega crashes—like Edwards' this past spring, which injured seven people and could have been much worse—to sell their next race. Most of all, I don't want to see a repeat of what this sport went through in those 10 dreadful months between May of 2000 and February of 2001. I just want everyone to walk away.

Is that an overreaction? Maybe. But I fear what we are seeing right now are warnings, just as there were warnings leading up to the Daytona 500 seven years ago, warnings that ultimately went unheeded and cost an iconic figure his life.

Then again, we are talking about Talladega, where warnings can be interpreted as entertainment. So the series will move on, and Newman's accident will fade into a footnote, and talk of reigning in the big Alabama track will be put on hold. And next April we will return to the place, and somebody else will go airborne, and people will gasp in terror or fascination, and I will learn to hate Talladega Superspeedway all over again.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.

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