A safety flap on the roof of Elliott Sadler’s #38 M&M’s Ford failed to deploy at Talladega, which likely contributed to the frightening flight that destroyed the Robert Yates Racing entry. “If you look closely at the video, the roof flap on the right side didn’t appear to do everything it was supposed to do to keep the car on the ground,” Nelson said. “That’s where our focus is right now.” Nelson, NASCAR’s managing director of competition, has initiated an intense investigation into the accident. Nelson called his engineering team together Monday to review video tape of the accident and inspect every inch of Sadler’s mangled machine, now parked in the NASCAR Research and Development Center in Concord, N.C.”It raised a lot of questions that we’re now trying to work out the answers,” Nelson said. Nelson stressed the flaps of Sadler’s car were examined during NASCAR’s inspection procedures before Sunday’s EA Sports 500. Two pop-up flaps and a pair of metal strips are installed on the roof of every Winston Cup car, designed to keep the 3,400-pound racers on the ground during a spin. NASCAR added an additional metal strip along the rear window for more down force in a spin after Ryan Newman’s Dodge flipped through the air during the Daytona 500. Asked if NASCAR needs to go back to the drawing board to find a fix to keep stock cars from going airborne, Nelson said his current investigation will likely tell the story. “Our analysis will tell us that,” he said. “But knowing the No. 48 car went through the same thing and did not get airborne tells us that the rules made to keep the cars on the ground worked on one and one got airborne.”( Daytona Beach News Journal )(10-1-2003)
