by Ryan McGee

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"How in the world did I survive that?"

Last Sunday afternoon at the Pocono Raceway, Gordon damn near knocked down the Turn 1 wall. The four-time NASCAR champion lost his brakes entering the hard lefthander, sliding through the grass and mud with so much force that it ripped the sheet metal off his Chevy and then smashing into the wall, driver's side first at speeds a lot closer to 200 miles per hour than you or I will ever travel without a plane ticket.

The crash was so violent that the men in the NASCAR on FOX broadcast booth didn't know exactly what to say. Their immediate reaction of shouts was followed by a pregnant pause. For those of us in the racing business, it is the worst kind of silence that there is, the kind where you sit and wait and squint your eyes to see if there is movement in the cockpit. Though few will admit it, most, if not all, racing journalists in attendance were thinking the same thing, even if only for a split second. "I can't believe I am going to have to write Jeff Gordon's obituary."

Then Gordon's voice crackled over the radio. He was OK. And the mountains of Pennsylvania were instantly filled with the exhaled breath of 100,000 fans in the grandstand, millions more at home and hundreds of men and women on pit road. As the driver climbed out of his car, safety crews were blown away by the fact that he was not only coherent but was asking about his Monte Carlo and gave it a once over to see how close he had come to leaving the track in a hospital chopper.

"That was one of the hardest hits I have ever taken," he later told FOX reporter Steve Byrnes, still a little shaken. "Between the soft wall and the seat and the safety device, I never got knocked out, and I was surprised that I feel pretty good."

The soft walls, the seat and the safety device. Three items that have become so commonplace in NASCAR it is hard to believe that not a single one of them were present in the garage just six years ago. It wasn't that they didn't exist. Everyone just found an excuse not to use them.

In the late 1990's, various soft wall systems were available, most of them made of recycled rubber. Formula One tracks used a block rubber system that was designed by a member of the Ferrari family, but American ovals turned him down flat, citing the danger of bouncing a car back into traffic. Styrofoam and cardboard-based systems were also written off by track operators as too expensive, ineffective and too messy to clean up after wrecks.

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Programs of the week Sunday, 3/22 on FOX 1:30 pm: Food City 500 This week on SPEED Friday, 3/20 Noon: Cup practice 1:30 pm: N'wide practice 3:00 pm: NASCAR LIVE 3:30 pm: Cup qualifying 4:30 pm: N'wide practice 7:00 pm: Trackside Saturday, 3/21 11:00 am: Cup practice 12:20 pm: Cup practice Sunday, 3/22 11:00 am: NASCAR in a hurry 11:30 am: NASCAR Raceday 8:00 pm: Victory Lane All times ET Race Trax: Updates, live results NASCAR on SPEED schedule

Racing seats hadn't evolved much during the 1980's and '90's with most drivers still using stock aluminum bucket seats. Some drivers were still so old school as to build their own seats, little more than padded chairs bolted to the inside of the cockpit.

At that same time, head and neck restraints were becoming widely used in sports car racing and some open wheel racing, but most stock car drivers refused to use them, declaring that they were too restrictive and would limit their mobility.

Then came February 18, 2001. That's when Dale Earnhardt died and the racing world changed forever. A six-month, multi-million dollar, two-volume report by NASCAR proved what everyone already knew. Something had to be done, and the parts to do so already existed — they just weren't being utilized. Beginning that season, they were.

"I have said it forever," says driver Ricky Craven, whose Cup career was punctuated by head injuries. "I think years from now, we will look back on the first 50 years of NASCAR racing and always wonder why we raced for so long with cheap seats, no neck restraints and concrete walls."

On Sunday at Pocono, Gordon was sitting in a form-fitted raceseat, molded and constructed around his exact dimensions. Each year, he meets with the seat designers and sits down into what is essentially a bag of foam that shapes itself around his body and acts as mold for every race seat he will use throughout the year.

Gordon also wears a HANS device, a carbon-fiber instrument that sits on his shoulders and is connected to the rear of his helmet. Earnhardt died from an injury known as a basal skull fracture. It occurs when the car comes to a sudden stop and the head lurches forward away from the body, which is strapped into the seat. When Gordon hit the wall at Pocono, the HANS device held back his head so it would remain in contact with his neck and body, preventing any sudden spine or brain trauma. NASCAR mandated use of head and neck restraints as part of its post-Earnhardt safety revolution.

And the wall that Gordon met head on at nearly three times the interstate speed limit was a much different beast than the fence of Pocono races past. The SAFER barrier was installed during the summer of 2004, completing the installation of the so-called "soft wall" on every Nextel Cup track. Prior to the aluminum energy-absorbing wall, the track had been trimmed with what was essentially boilerplate steel and concrete, backed by mounds of dirt. It was a wall that broke Dale Earnhardt's collarbone in 1979.

If Earnhardt were still around, I feel very confident in saying that he would be a big fan of today's safety innovations. Initially, he would have resisted — he hated wearing the HANS — but, like the rest of us, any lingering doubts would have likely been vaporized by Gordon's wild ride into the Pocono wall.

A moment that could have been one of the greatest tragedies in NASCAR history was reduced to a soon-to-be-forgotten footnote thanks to a little bit of aluminum, rubber, foam and carbon fiber.

Big Ben Roethlisberger should be so lucky.