Safety enhancements are on the way to the Cup Series race cars at Watkins Glen this coming weekend thanks to crash data gathered from mouthpieces worn by a handful of drivers throughout the season, including NASCAR Ford driver Ryan Blaney. Even though there weren’t any wrecks the last time the Cup Series visited the twisting road course, the data returned that drivers experienced impact-like scenarios just from racing normally.
According to a report from NASCAR.com, data collected from drivers’ mouthpieces at Watkins Glen in 2023 revealed that drivers experienced impact-like forces in the “Bus Stop,” a series of corners on track that resemble a city bus stop.
“We were pretty blown away,” John Patalak, NASCAR vice president of safety engineering, said. “Over a quarter of our season’s mouthpiece sensor events were coming from one location on one track. So that started the Bus Stop reconfiguration. We pulled a lot of video and talked to a lot of drivers in the following days.”
Some of the data was collected from Blaney, driver of the No. 12 NASCAR Ford Mustang Dark Horse. He has been wearing a mouthpiece since last year’s Daytona summer race, which recorded his head acceleration during a wreck and provided useful context for NASCAR’s safety engineering team. He regretted not having the mouthpiece when he wrecked at Nashville several months earlier.
“They get the black box for the car, but the driver is a whole different thing,” Blaney said. “We’re the softest thing in the race car. We were still tweaking on the car between Nashville and Daytona, they had cut some gussets in the clip to try to crush it more, so I wish we could have got the data from Nashville. I was like, ‘Man, I’ve got to wear this just to give them some data on where to go with this car and continue to make it (safer).'”
Blaney was initially resistant to the idea of the mouthpiece, but learned that removing it during cautions provided some relief.
“It’s fairly thin, but there’s still wires running through it on the molar side,” he said. “I don’t speak too differently with it in, but I just didn’t want to have anything in my mouth for 500 miles. That was my only concern, but I just kind of got used to it after a while.”
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