Motorsports safety should be a priority across all racing venues. New products are helping by lowering costs and improving protection.

Promoting safety throughout all levels of motorsports is not just about sanctioning body rules or regulatory standards. It’s about stimulating and nurturing a proactive culture where drivers and crews respect safety as much as they value winning.
While professional race classes are often equipped with state-of-the-art safety measures and support systems, there may be limited resources in some amateur and grassroots ranks. All the more reason individual racers should take more personal initiative in supporting current safety practices.

“We recognize that most racers are sportsman, not professionals. Come the weekend, they want to enjoy racing, come home safely, and go back to work on Monday,” said Don Taylor of RacingGoesSafer.org, a non-profit affiliated with the Stand 21 Safety Foundation that raises awareness of safety issues in auto racing. 

“In the professional levels, such as F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR, they all heard the safety message some years ago,” Taylor said. “They’ve adopted better helmets, seats, frontal head restraints, and so forth. It’s at the sportsman level that we really need the education of how to select safety equipment, why it’s important, and how to use it.”

Reaching out to the sportsman and amateur racers is critical to ensuring safety in the sport, mostly because there may be a false sense of security due to the lower speeds of the cars or the shorter distances of the events.

“They may think the challenges aren’t as great. But when you crash, there’s still a lot of G-loading. By understanding head-and-neck and concussion injuries, we realize there are ways to prevent those,” said Taylor, who often leads safety presentations at the PRI Show and other events around the country. “Racers just need to be educated, and that’s why we like to do these face-to-face meetings.”

The Cost of Being Safe

What’s the biggest hurdle in convincing racers to examine their safety strategies?

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