CONCORD, N.C. — With a few flicks of the wrist that operate the four color-coded levers on the back of the tow truck, the race car that’s sitting on its roof begins to rotate over so that it gently can be placed upright back on its wheels. It’s a precise sequence that requires the perfect amount of finesse by the operator, otherwise the car could slam back down on the ground, possibly injuring the occupant.
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How to roll over a car that’s upside down is an essential element for a NASCAR track services worker. And it’s why on this Saturday in January, this is a featured station during NASCAR’s annual safety seminar at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Among those attending this mass training exercise are track service workers representing nearly every venue on NASCAR’s three national touring schedules and various fire departments servicing those facilities, all going through almost every conceivable scenario they may encounter during a race weekend.
Only once in 2022 did a Cup Series car flip and not settle back on its wheels. That occurred last May when in a wild accident during the Cup Series race at Charlotte, Chris Buescher’s No. 17 Ford flipped four and a half times through the infield before coming to a rest on its roof.
Standing inside the gym at RFK Racing last month, Buescher reflected on the events from his accident. He remembers being strapped in his upside-down race car thinking it wouldn’t be too long before the track services team flipped over his car so that he’d be able to remove himself.
Quickly, workers descended on the car to check on Buescher’s status. Buescher dropped his window net — the universal indicator within NASCAR that a driver is OK after being involved in a crash. NASCAR policy states that a driver must remain in their vehicle when upside down — if they unstrap, they could either injure themselves or further aggravate an injury they had sustained during the accident. So as Buescher sat in his car, track workers knew he was OK, but they now faced a scenario they practiced for but had never attempted in a “live” situation. They needed to flip the car back over and extract Buescher in a reasonable amount of time.
In this instance, however, the extraction was going slower than expected. And inside the car, Buescher’s temperament was taking a turn as he thought he should’ve already been out of the car.
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“The response time to the car was great,” Buescher said. “But actually, figuring out what to do from that situation going forward, it was significantly too long a period of time to do something about it to get it hooked up. We should have been better earlier on. We should have had some more practice with that.
“I was pretty upset about it.”
Although Buescher was uninjured and out of his car in under five minutes, neither NASCAR nor Buescher nor his team were satisfied with how the sequence unfolded — thus, why extracting a driver from their upside-down vehicle is a point of emphasis during this training session.
“We thought we had a pretty good plan, but then once you get to it in the heat of the moment, there were a couple of minor things we had to adapt to,” said Terry Kibler, NASCAR’s manager of track services. “We started with a brand-new wrecker service last year that was touring to every event with us. We changed the way that we towed race cars for the Next Gen.
“So once we got into a rollover situation, what we thought was going to work and what we trained with just in that situation didn’t work the best so we had to modify. Some of that was parking. As the other equipment from the track gets there, it clutters up the scene and it makes it tough for the wrecker to get in, which sort of happened in Charlotte.”
Watching all this unfold before him as he sat inside the scoring tower high above the track was Mike Phillips, NASCAR’s managing director of track services, who oversees the department responsible for fire and rescue, track repair and vehicle recovery. Phillips understood immediately that while his team had immediately responded to the accident, the procedure to remove Buescher did not go as smoothly as intended. Although the entire sequence took just five minutes, this was at least two minutes longer than Phillips’ targeted time.
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Despite NASCAR’s longest race concluding at 11:40 p.m. ET, Phillips called a meeting with his track services team to dissect what transpired. That meeting didn’t wrap until nearly 2:30 a.m., Phillips said, and the following morning he met with his team at NASCAR’s research and development center just down the road from CMS to again review the events. The team then went back to CMS to look over the scene of the crash.
A Cup car hasn’t flipped and landed on its roof since Buescher’s crash. But should a car end up with its wheels facing the sky, Phillips is confident the response time will be significantly quicker than it was last May.
“We as a collective group did a lot of training around rolling that car over, making sure those processes were in place,” Phillips said. “But if you notice when we rolled over the 17, that was in real-time, it wasn’t in training — it’s like playing a basketball game, you practice every day but when you get to the foul line and there is 0.1 seconds left the pressure is really on. So we needed to shore up the fact that we need to train over and over and over and over again. And that was the focus at the training session in that we were going to be more proficient at rolling the car over in real-time.”
Across two days at January’s training session, 340 track service workers completed various exercises depending on their specialty. Inside a garage bay, groups practiced taking a roof off a car to remove a driver and then place them on a backboard; how to remove a driver’s helmet and head and neck safety device to render medical attention if so required; and finding tow hooks on Cup, Xfinity, prototype and GTD sports cars, as well as a modified, and extraction points on these vehicles.
Behind the garage, crews who worked on the tow trucks got reps on how to hook up a vehicle and maneuver it through the garage, including backing it up into a stall. Another tutorial was learning what each color-coded lever corresponds to while maneuvering one of the two straps.
Prior to joining NASCAR 23 years ago, Phillips was a firefighter for two decades, an experience that taught him the importance of muscle memory. In the midst of an emergency, second-nature actions can save precious seconds. Imparting this knowledge to NASCAR, he had each of the four levers on every tow truck wrapped with colored tape so a crew member can instantly recognize each lever regardless of the type of tow truck being used.
“My thought process was to make this as simple as I possibly can for everybody that’s going to have a responsibility to be on a racetrack having to do this,” Phillips said. “You don’t need it to be complicated standing there — ‘Well, which one does what? Which one goes up, which one goes down?’ You don’t have time for that.”
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On pit road and on the track, the exercises were even more hands-on. Crews went over how to repair walls and SAFER barriers and effectively patch holes in the track. Chassis were placed in pit stalls with controlled fires set underneath that needed to be extinguished. As crew members circled around the cars, they were continually reminded to never turn their backs to coming traffic, always keep an eye on any approaching vehicle, and “move with a purpose” — a refrain uttered throughout the afternoon.
Down the frontstretch toward Turn 1, NASCAR’s American Medical Response traveling safety team, consisting of a dedicated pool of physicians and paramedics worked through various scenarios they’re likely to encounter.
Wearing blue fire suits, the team practiced procedures for if a car is pinned against a wall and the driver requires medical treatment, what to do if one driver confronts another while that second driver is being treated, and how to walk on the banking, which can be tricky upon exiting a safety vehicle. Depending on the direction the safety vehicle is parked, the first step out is either down the banking, where it’s not uncommon for someone to lose their balance, or up the banking, which can cause the doors to close on their own.
After the completion of the separate stations, a collective group exercise tied the teachings together. For the next hour-plus, a NASCAR official called out various scenarios over the radio: multiple crashed cars in the tri-oval; a car stopped up against the Turn 4 wall; a disabled car in the middle of pit road; drivers fighting in the infield. Each situation necessitated different responses and often forced the track service workers to adapt on the fly.
Inevitably, of course, something will occur at some point during the season that wasn’t rehearsed. It happens every year. In 2022, for instance, several drivers had in-race fires in their cars when energy-absorbing foam came in contact with the exhaust.
When such a moment happens, Phillips takes out a three-ring binder he carries with him he appropriately calls the “Oh S—!” book. Totaling 384 pages, it’s his how-to guide on addressing unique situations that he’s encountered over the years.
That knowledge, combined with extensive preparation, instills confidence in Phillips that he and his team can handle whatever obstacle they encounter.
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“You’re always going to run into something that you’ve never seen before,” Phillips said. “But what I would say to folks is we’re as prepared for the unknown of any place you will ever go in motorsports because we do this day in, day out. We train every day. We’re going to be as prepared as we possibly can knowing that something unknown is going to happen.”
(Top photo of Chris Buescher’s flipped car at the Coca-Cola 600 last May: James Gilbert / Getty Images; videos: Jordan Bianchi / The Athletic)
