All for car recovery

" JEERS , as always, to the four-hour long heart attack that is restrictor plate racing." Ever since I started commenting on Carol's CHEERS and JEERS columns, I've automatically put that in at the start of my comments on every race at Talladega, because I believe that restrictor plates are as dangerous as the excessive speeds that they are meant to prevent. Now, I think, it's becoming clear to all involved that nothing can be done to fix the problem by changing the cars, and something is going to have to be done to the track itself. Safety concerns about the big superspeedway are nothing new--at the very first race there, in 1969, the Professional Drivers Association, a drivers union led by Richard Petty, went on strike immediately before the inaugural Talladega 500, because the Daytona tires that Goodyear and Firestone had brought had proven inadequate for the higher speeds the track generated during practice. Bill France, Sr., not wanting his big new superspeedway to face the embarassment of cancelling the inaugural race, personally ran high-speed laps in a car borrowed from one of the teams; when the PDA refused to go on, he simply invited replacement drivers to run the race, using drivers from the support race held the day before, and, reputedly, even drivers grabbed from the half-mile dirt track across the street from the new track. The young-and-fearless replacement drivers ran, seeing this as their big break (indeed, it was Richard Childress's first Grand National race), with Richard Brickhouse scoring his only Grand National victory. By the spring race in 1970, the tire companies had developed new tires specifically for Talladega's high speeds, largely setting those fears to rest, but the track remained seen as one of the most dangerous on the Grand National circuit, due to the exceedingly high speeds it generated. The track has seen many bizarre accidents and numerous driver fatalities over the years; the spring race in 1973 saw the first time that...

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