McDowell's wrecked car to be examined by officials

FORT WORTH, Texas -- Before Michael McDowell's totaled No. 00 Toyota winds up in the salvage yard, NASCAR's research and development team wants a chance to inspect the damage.

McDowell was able to walk away from an accident in Friday's qualifying session that later took Texas Motor Speedway crews three hours to replace a 28-foot section of the SAFER barrier that was severely bowed by the impact. The battered hulk of what remained of McDowell's machine was placed under a tarp and will be on its way to the R&D facility in Concord, N.C., next week.

Michael McDowell walked away with only hurt feelings after a near head-on accident in Friday's qualifying at Texas.

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NASCAR vice president for competition Robin Pemberton said it's standard procedure for NASCAR to evaluate how its safety initiatives hold up in severe crashes, particularly the advancements that have been made in the new car.

"We do it occasionally," Pemberton said. "We did it with Jeff Gordon's car after Vegas. We'll take it back, let our people do some measurements on it and go through some stuff with the team. It's an evaluation. We do that quite a lot."

Pemberton said NASCAR engineers may be particularly interested in this crash, because it should provide some valuable telemetry to show forces and loads on the car when it impacted the SAFER barrier and then tumbled at least eight times.

"I don't know if anything's textbook," Pemberton said. "Every [incident] seems to be different. It was a substantial, rather spectacular incident, so we'll take this opportunity to go back and learn what we can with it.

"We'll look at all the numbers. We'll measure it and look at loads and hits and all of that. We'll put it in our database and take that opportunity to learn some stuff."

An initial inspection of the car by NASCAR officials following the accident seemed to indicate that all of the safety features on the car performed as expected, according to Pemberton.

"It seemed to," Pemberton said. "Once again, it's hard to really make a judgment on it, in the field like this. Everybody took a good look at it. It's best to do it in a closed environment where we can really take our time and look.

"When we measure these cars, we know where everything is, all of the components and all the structure is, within a thousandth of an inch. We've got a sheet on every one of these cars. We'll go back and we may compare some of those initial numbers from when the car was new until now."

Pemberton said safety is something that is an evolutionary process. And studying the data from McDowell's crash will help engineers as they continue to make improvements to the current design.

"It's a baseline but it's constantly moving," Pemberton said. "With incidents like this and Jeff Gordon's and some other ones, it's an opportunity for us to constantly monitor the situation and we're constantly trying to make improvements and working with the teams."