NASCAR president Mike Helton Helton said at Thursday’s session at the NASCAR research and development center in Concord that the sport will hire an emergency medical technician to travel from race to race and ride in a chase vehicle that’s designed to be among the first on the scene in the case of a crash where a driver might be injured. The EMT’s role, Helton said, will not be to supervise the medical care given to an injured driver – that would be the job of doctors and other medical personnel from each track’s medical staff. “An addition of an EMT to our staff is to help NASCAR provide direction and supervision over the standards and the requirements that we ask the tracks for,” Helton said. “Also it provides a familiar face, if you will, in addition to other familiar faces that we’ll use in chase vehicles or pace cars or in different situations so that the competitors to see and to feel that they have someone that they recognize that they can communicate with.”(ThatsRacin.com)(1-23-2004)
