How NASCAR has addressed safety issues since Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s tragic accident at Daytona.
The NASCAR world is in shock after Monday’s Daytona 500 ended with a horrific crash on the last lap that left veteran driver Ryan Newman in “serious condition.”
As the leaders jockeyed for position just before reaching the finish line to take the checkered flag, Newman’s car was bumped from behind and sent spinning into the outside wall at full speed. The vicious impact caused Newman’s car to overturn, and as he slid on his roof along the track, driver Corey LaJoie hit Newman’s car, which continued to slide on its roof all the way to the infield grass. Newman was immediately transported to nearby Halifax Health Medical Center. Fortunately, according to a statement from his team, Roush Fenway Racing, Newman’s injuries are not life-threatening.
Here is the final lap of the Daytona 500 in which Ryan Newman's car was flipped at the line.
Auto racing is an inherently dangerous sport, and accidents such as the one at the end of the Daytona 500 serve as a reminder that each driver is putting their life on the line every weekend.
Following the death of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Sr. at Daytona in 2001, NASCAR has made driver safety a top priority, and the advancements that have been made over the last two decades – from the design of the car, to the construction of the track walls – may have helped save Newman’s life.
The HANS device
In October of 2001, just after the death of ARCA series driver Blaise Alexander at Charlotte Motor Speedway, NASCAR mandated that all drivers wear a head and neck restraint system called the HANS device starting in the 2002 season. The device is designed to restrict the head movement that can occur due to the rapid deceleration experienced in an accident.
Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY Staff
The SAFER barrier
In 2002, Indianapolis Motor Speedway became the first circuit on the NASCAR schedule to install the SAFER barrier – a wall developed to replace the concrete barriers that were present at tracks that can absorb energy from a collision. The SAFER barrier has become the standard outside wall at all NASCAR tracks, and after Kyle Busch suffered a broken leg at Daytona in 2015 after colliding with an infield wall, the track installed the SAFER barrier along every surface a driver could impact.
AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack
The NASCAR Research and Development Center
In 2003, NASCAR opened its Research and Development Center in North Carolina, where a group studies on-track incidents and devises new ways to keep drivers safe. The R&D Center has a database of precise measurements recorded by each car’s Incident Data Recorder – a “black box” that was implemented in 2002.
Car redesigns
With the introduction of the “Car of Tomorrow” in 2007, NASCAR drivers began racing in a redesigned cockpit that provided better protection in the event of a crash. The driver’s seat was moved away from the sidepanel of the car and more towards the center – and with the introduction of Generation 6 cars, drivers have a larger cockpit that is protected by energy-absorbing material along the frame. In 2021, NASCAR will move to a new, seventh-generation car, which has been designed with safety as a top priority.
Fire safety
NASCAR has also made advancements in fire safety. Starting in 2003, teams were required to install a fire extinguishing cylinder near the fuel cell that is heat activated and releases a fire suppressant in the event of a fire.
SportsPulse: For The Win’s Michelle Martinelli was in attendance for the Daytona 500 and witnessed the horrific crash that left driver Ryan Newman in ‘serious condition’ at a nearby hospital.
SportsPulse: For The Win’s Michelle Martinelli was in attendance for the Daytona 500 and witnessed the horrific crash that left driver Ryan Newman in ‘serious condition’ at a nearby hospital.
Ryan Newman was in a horrific crash on the final lap of the 2020 Daytona 500.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Following Monday’s Daytona 500 finish, the NASCAR world prayed for Ryan Newman, who was in a violent crash at the end of the last lap of the race.
Newman was leading the race at the end, but Ryan Blaney made contact with Newman’s No. 6 Ford from behind and the car turned, flipped upside down and slid from the track at Daytona International Speedway onto pit road while flames and sparks flew out of it.
Although his injuries are “not life threatening,” Newman is being treated at the local Halifax Health Medical Center and is in “serious condition,” according to a statement from Roush Fenway Racing.
Here is the final lap of the Daytona 500 in which Ryan Newman's car was flipped at the line.
Denny Hamlin won his second consecutive Daytona 500 and crossed the finish line to beat out Blaney just as Newman was wrecking. He and his Joe Gibbs Racing team stopped celebrating once they learned the severity of the crash, and Gibbs repeatedly apologized the celebrations.
“I hope he’s all right,” said Blaney, who was clearly distraught over the wreck. “That looked really bad and not something you want to do. Definitely unintentional. … It sucks to lose a race, but you never want to see anyone get hurt.”
Blaney, who finished second, said if he couldn’t win the race, he wanted to help a Ford driver, Newman, win over Hamlin in a Toyota. He said he was trying to push Newman to victory, but they “just got bumpers hooked up wrong and turned him.”
“We’re praying for Ryan,” Hamlin said after the race.
So is the NASCAR world after such a horrific incident.
Everything you need to know to watch the race, which has been rescheduled for Monday following bad weather on Sunday.
The Daytona 500 was postponed until Monday after serious rainstorms soaked the track on Sunday. It was a disappointing end to a long day for race fans, but there is one bonus: Extra racing on Monday!
The postponement came after three hours of weather-related delays on Sunday. The first came immediately following an appearance from President Donald Trump, which pushed back the start time for 13 minutes, and sent drivers back to pit road.
The drivers were called back out at 6:40 p.m. for a brief moment, but not everyone was even out of the pits when even heavier rain came down, and NASCAR made the call to push the race back until Monday. This is the second time in 62 years the race will be completed on Monday.
Here’s everything you need to know to watch today:
Want to catch up on some reading before the race? Our own Michelle Martinelli has been down in Daytona all week reporting out some great stories, including what it’s like to see Daytona from the sky.
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Yes, flying inches away from each other, most of the Thunderbirds aren’t facing forward.
This is the Daytona 500 from the Sky: A multi-part series from For The Win looking at NASCAR’s biggest race of the year from an aerial perspective.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — When the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds perform the flyover for Sunday’s Daytona 500 (2:30 p.m. ET, FOX), the six pilots fly their F-16 jets between 18 inches and three feet apart in a delta formation, as they perfectly time their appearance with the end of the national anthem. Specifically, it’s the last word, “brave.”
And even more impressive: Most of the pilots aren’t even looking forward while flying.
As Maj. Michelle Curran, Thunderbird No. 5, explained, Lt. Col. John Caldwell is Thunderbird No. 1 — he’s also known as Boss — and he leads the way in the delta formation as they fly over Daytona International Speedway.
“Everyone is flying off of the jet closer to the boss than them,” Curran told For The Win.
“So we have Thunderbird No. 1 out in the middle. He sets the timing. He’s the one responsible for making sure you see us go right over at the ‘B’ in ‘brave’ in the national anthem. So lots of pressure on him. He’s also flying a nice, smooth platform because we’re on the wings.”
And those pilots on the wings, two on each side of No. 1, are either looking to their right or left during the flyover, rather than looking straight forward, which requires a lot of practice and trust.
“I’m staring at No. 2’s jet and setting references and seeing the back of his head, as he’s looks at Boss, who’s all the way in the middle,” said Curran, who’s only the fifth female Thunderbird and second lead solo pilot for their airshow demonstrations.
“The same thing’s happening the on other side all looking towards the middle. So we often times don’t even know when we actually went over the track because the angle you’re looking at, you can’t really see it. You only know because the boss calls a turn afterwards. He’s like, ‘Right turn!’ And you’re like, ‘Oh we already did it. It’s done. We did the flyover!'”
(John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports)
Curran is in her second year with the Thunderbirds but 11th overall with the U.S. Air Force. So this is her second Daytona 500 flyover, but she had plenty of practice with the Thunderbirds’ nine-month schedule filled with flyovers and airshows.
And she learned their heads turned to the side for flyovers isn’t the most comfortable thing.
“It hurts for a while, and then I think part way through the season, your body adapts to it,” Curran said. “And then by the end of the season, you’re like, ‘OK, it’s time for this to be done because my neck and back are really sore from looking in one direction.’ But you get used to it.”
For the Daytona 500, the F-16 jets at Daytona Beach International Airport adjacent to the Daytona race track. Curran said the Thunderbirds take off between 30 and 45 minutes before the national anthem, and they fly over to the beach to their “hold point,” which is a low air traffic area.
It takes them about 20 minutes to get from the beach airspace to the track, and their team members on the ground are providing updates about the anthem singer’s timing and if that person is a few seconds ahead or behind their usual pace. The good news for them is Air Force Technical Sgt. Nalani Quintello is this year’s singer.
Once the Thunderbirds are on their way to the track, they can speed up or slow down, to a certain extent, to time their flyover with the end of the anthem and “can normally make up the difference,” Curran said.
(Brian Lawdermilk/Getty Images)
The Thunderbirds also have a little something special planned for Sunday’s Daytona 500. It’s called a delta burst, which is when they’re in the standard delta formation and then all go in opposite directions like a firework.
Curran said it’s not standard for a flyover, but they’ve practiced it multiple times. She said the plan is to do a regular flyover and then come back around for the command — “Drivers, start your engines!” — and then do the burst.
“It’s a lot of people’s favorite maneuver, so that’ll be cool,” Curran said.
Three days before the Daytona 500, Bubba Wallace jumped out of a plane into the Daytona track.
This is the Daytona 500 from the Sky: A multi-part series from For The Win looking at NASCAR’s biggest race of the year from an aerial perspective.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The first time NASCAR driver Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr. went skydiving, he landed inside the track at Daytona International Speedway.
Three days before the NASCAR Cup Series season-opening Daytona 500, the No. 43 Chevrolet driver jumped in tandem out of a plane, thanks to race sponsor, the U.S. Air Force. Although he said they missed their mark near the 2.5-mile track’s start-finish line by about 50 yards, they still comfortably landed on the grass.
“When my first foot went off [the plane], that’s when I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this,'” Wallace told For The Win. “We did a flip out, and I got it all together and we were doing it.”
Wallace — who will start 11th in the Daytona 500 in his Richard Petty Motorsports car — said it was particularly helpful to have someone else, his partner Randy, attached to him and leading the way as they jumped.
“He didn’t force me out, but he was controlling the motions,” Wallace said.
“He started walking, and the next thing you know, we’re off the back of the plane. At that moment right there, I was beyond scared. But it went from nervous to scared to this is awesome in a matter of two to three seconds.”
For about 45 seconds, the 26-year-old driver entering his third full-time Cup Series season said he was free-falling at what felt like 100 miles an hour. But then they pulled their parachute at about 5,000 feet and cruised down into the race track.
It took them about 10 minutes to reach the ground.
(Brian Lawdermilk/Getty Images)
“It’s the same view you have if you’re sitting gin a commercial jet looking out the window,” Wallace said about looking down at the track from the sky.
“But everything’s starting to get bigger and bigger, and the next thing you know, it’s like, ‘Oh man, we’re right over the race track.’ So it was cool.”
Wallace said the Air Force is always asking him what fun things he wants to do with them, but he doesn’t always know what’s on the table.
He’s flown twice in fighter jets — For The Win did too this week — he said, and would definitely go skydiving again.
“It was a ton of fun, really cool experience,” Wallace said.
NASCAR’s spotters guide drivers to the best part of Daytona’s track and keep them out of massive wrecks — or at least try to.
This is the Daytona 500 from the Sky: A multi-part series from For The Win looking at NASCAR’s biggest race of the year from an aerial perspective.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The Daytona 500 is chaos. Cars careen into each other frequently. Last year, 21 of 40 cars were collected in a giant wreck with just a few laps remaining. The No. 1 factor in whether a driver makes it out clean? A spotter giving him direction through an earpiece based on what he sees from his perch high above Daytona International Speedway.
During the first and biggest race on the NASCAR Cup Series schedule, 40 spotters, one for each entered team, are crammed onto an elevated platform on the roof of the tower, which includes the press box and suites below and hovers over the track’s frontstretch grandstands. The spotters stand isn’t particularly wide, and each spotter only has a couple feet of space to occupy as they’re looking down at the iconic 2.5-mile race track.
They’re armed with binoculars, water, sunscreen, four radios and several spare batteries just in case — Chase Elliott’s spotter, Eddie D’Hondt, even had a sandwich bag filled with throat lozenges Saturday — the spotters’ job at Daytona is simple, in theory: Communicate constantly with the drivers, keep them safe and give your team a chance to win by surviving the all-but-guaranteed carnage.
Eddie D’Hondt, Chase Elliott’s spotter, gets ready for the last Daytona 500 practice.
At one of NASCAR’s longest tracks, the cars draft off each other, racing inches apart and capitalizing on their own momentum or stealing someone else’s. Because of the draft, spotters and drivers agreed the superspeedways — like Daytona, Talladega Superspeedway and Pocono Raceway — are where the spotters are the most crucial. Over their team radios, they’re throwing as much valuable information as they can at the driver — though careful not to talk just to talk — while guiding the car to the lane with the most momentum and keeping it out of trouble.
“[The] spotter is very important at the [superspeedway] races because you can’t see everything that you want to see,” defending Cup Series champion Kyle Busch said. “In a perfect world, if you could drive the race car from outside the back of the car like you can on a video game, that’s where you want to be.”
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The spotters are talking almost constantly, describing as many observations as they can to aid the driver’s decision-making. It’s a wide range, like who’s going two- or three- wide and where, who’s about to push you, who’s making a move, when to throw a block, when they’ve cleared a car, who’s about to wreck, who’s already wrecking and where to go to avoid it.
Seamless communication could be the difference between avoiding a crash by inches or getting your race car towed off the track. Trust between a driver and spotter is critical too because, as defending Daytona 500 champ Denny Hamlin explained, “I do not have time to check to make sure what my spotter is telling me is true.”
Sometimes, even a team’s crew chief will tell the spotter to relay a message about strategy or the car’s handling to the driver instead of jumping on the radio and saying it himself for the sake of continuity.
Similar to the NASCAR saying about superspeedway masters “seeing” the flow of the air, the spotters feel like they can see and sense momentum shifts. But there’s still plenty of luck involved at Daytona, so it’s not everyone’s favorite track.
“Ultimately, it all comes down to the racing gods,” Tony Hirschman, Busch’s spotter, said. “When they’re all wrecking around you, they’re either going to wreck into your lane or wreck away from you, so fingers crossed that you can maybe try to skate on through.”
TJ Majors — who’s entering his 16th full-time Cup Series season and was previously Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s spotter — said he could even look at a random photo or video and identify which car has momentum or is about to make a move.
“I’d keep saying to [Majors] before every race at Daytona: ‘Just remember, TJ, just paint the picture,’” said Earnhardt, who won two Daytona 500s. “I wanted him to feel like I never needed to look in the mirror out of curiosity, and I could always focus on what’s going on in front of me.”
***
Although everyone wants their team to be the last one standing in Victory Lane, working together is advantageous at a track like Daytona. Not only will teammates coordinate to draft with each other, but teams with the same manufacturer, Toyota, Ford or Chevrolet, will fall in line and draft together — at least until the end when it becomes every man for himself. Without a little teamwork, the physics of racing could leave them behind to fend for themselves.
There are also little in-race side deals spotters will sometimes negotiate with each other — like help on a late restart after a caution flag slows the field – but that game plan only works about 15 percent of the time, Hirschman guessed. Even if the spotter agrees to help out another team, perhaps the driver won’t or can’t, depending on how the moment plays out.
The view of the track from the spotters stand at Daytona.
Coordinating outside of their teams isn’t exclusive to races either. Saturday during the final Daytona 500 practice, seven-time champion and No. 48 Chevrolet driver Jimmie Johnson’s spotter, Earl Barban, walked down the spotters stand asking, “Anyone drafting?”
To which Majors, who’s Joey Logano’s spotter for the No. 22 Ford team, replied with a laugh, “Not with you.”
Some ask another team’s spotter to work with them. Others are a little more direct. But it still doesn’t always work out if the drivers aren’t on board or don’t execute properly.
“I don’t ask; I tell,” D’Hondt said. “I’m one of the senior guys up there, so we get a lot of respect. So if I go and tell them something, it’s not really asking.
“And they’re respected too because I’ll get told also, ‘Hey, this is what I’m doing. I need your help.’ We get it. We’re up there 12, 14 hours a day, three days a week. We know everything about each other.”
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They spend that much time together because most spotters work the Cup Series, XFINITY Series and Truck Series. Some even do ARCA races and other lower-tiered events too.
“If you don’t [work the three national series], there’s something wrong with you,” said D’Hondt, who’s entering his 18th year in the Cup Series but has never won the Daytona 500.
Between practices for some series in the morning and races later in the day, spotters can be up on the unshaded stand for hours on hours. Some go up there with coolers with sandwiches, snacks and drinks, while Hirschman even has a folding chair he brings up there to help him “work smarter, not harder” and relax briefly during breaks.
The spotters stand during the last Daytona 500 practice on Saturday.
They each spot from the same place on the roof for each race, and it doesn’t change when they switch teams, Majors explained, because they’re all so used to their specific sight lines on the track.
The car numbers are written on the railing overlooking the track, sometimes along with their names and minimal notes jotted down on masking tape. Hirschman has “CHAMP18N” written next to his name after Busch’s No. 18 Toyota team won it all last season.
The spotters spend significantly more time on the roof of the tower with each other than they do with their own teams, and their schedules often line up together more than with their own team’s crew. Many of them have spent 38 race weekends on roofs at race tracks for years together, if not decades, so they become friends when they’re not competitors.
D’Hondt and TJ Majors, Joey Logano’s spotter and a self-described class clown.
Hirschman said he and Kevin Hamlin, Alex Bowman’s spotter with the No. 88 Chevrolet, are huge Duke fans and went out to dinner and watched the Blue Devils beat UNC the night before the Busch Clash, last weekend’s exhibition race at Daytona. Majors described himself as the class clown in between physically poking Chris Osborne, John Hunter Nemechek’s No. 38 Ford, during Saturday’s Cup practice.
“It’s like going to school,” Majors said. “Every year, you might have one or two new kids but for the most part, it’s the same group. … And it’s like we all have assigned seats because we go to the same spot that we’ve been spotting in for years.”
***
Being friends outside of work is great, but that doesn’t prevent plenty of in-race conflicts between spotters when there’s drama on the track.
At the 75-lap Clash last Sunday, Logano and Busch ignited a late wreck, and the finger pointing began. Frustrated, Busch described what appeared to be Logano blocking multiple times as “a few bad decisions,” while the No. 22 Ford driver brushed it off and said he thought he did “a good job blocking.”
As it turns out, their spotters were having the same debate — though it was a bit more intense and with each other, rather than through the media — up on the spotters stand.
Logano and Busch leading a wreck during the Clash, an exhibition event at Daytona International Speedway. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
Hirschman, Busch’s spotter, stands feet away from Majors, Logano’s spotter, on the spotters stand, and he said he only yelled at Majors “a little bit” after the crash took out Busch’s No. 18 Toyota but not the No. 22.
“I told him, ‘If you want to come down here and talk about Old Bay, then we’ll talk about that,’” Majors recalled, saying Hirschman puts the seasoning on everything.
“‘But until then, go back down to your spot!’ He started laughing a little bit for a second, then he got mad again.”
At the Daytona track, spotters are packed fairly close to each other, so although Hirshman and Majors’ fiery exchange wasn’t public, it also wasn’t private.
“Oh, it got pretty heated,” said D’Hondt, who’s stands immediately to the left of Majors and four places to the right of Hirschman. “I was right in the middle of it. TJ’s on one side of me, Tony’s two over on the other side, so I was like the bologna in the sandwich.”
Understandably, both Majors and Hirschman defended their respective drivers. Plus, seeing the wreck unfold only in real time, it’s easy to assume the other spotter and driver are 100 percent wrong.
Majors during the last Daytona 500 practice Saturday.
Days later, they were able to tease each other about it and let go of the blame, agreeing physics may have played the largest role in the wreck with Logano blocking Busch and getting loose, which led to Busch making contact with Logano’s car. But that’s much harder to recognize in the heat of the moment.
“You’ll have three or four different versions of a wreck,” Hirshman said. “You race enough and you’re competitive enough, there’s no angels out there. You’re going to have incidents, and everybody’s take on those vary.”
Stuck in the middle, D’Hondt said when these things happen, it’s best to let the spotters “hash it out” and try not to let it get physical.
“There have been a few physical confrontations, but they’re few and far between,” said Hirschman, who’s entering his ninth season spotting for Busch.
And they don’t take it personally, so it’s easy to let go and resume their friendship when the day is over.
“We’re not driving the cars,” Majors said. “I didn’t turn the wheel, and I know [Hirschman] didn’t work the gas and brake pedal of the car. He didn’t personally drive into us or whatever it was.”
***
To win the Daytona 500, everyone on the team has to perform nearly flawlessly, and even then, sometimes that’s not enough if the driver happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting collected in a massive wreck kicked off by someone else’s mistake. Communication from spotter to driver doesn’t just need to be constant, but it also needs to be precise and clear.
Spotters during practice for the Daytona 500.
“Everything has to be perfect,” Logano said. “And perfect means that you can still get caught up in something, obviously, out there. But the way you recover from it you need to be perfect.”
Spotters can’t predict every move, they can’t sense every ounce of momentum and, despite their high-tech binoculars, they don’t have a clear view of some parts of the 2.5-mile track. They’ll make mistakes just like drivers and hope an error doesn’t lead to a destroyed race car headed toward the garage. And if a screw-up hurts someone else, the best thing a spotter can do is find the aggrieved spotter up there and apologize.
“I can respect a guy that comes down there and says, ‘Hey, I messed up,’” Majors said.
“You can be mad and disappointed, but what are you going to do? You can’t change it now, so the quicker you can rebound and get yourself in your happy shoes, the better you’ll be.”
For The Win flew in the iconic Goodyear Blimp to see Daytona International Speedway from an incredible new angle.
This is the Daytona 500 from the Sky: A multi-part series from For The Win looking at NASCAR’s biggest race of the year from an aerial perspective.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — If the Goodyear Blimp is circling around a venue, it must be a big-time sporting event in NASCAR, college football, the NBA, the NFL or even American Ninja Warrior.
Few things are as synonymous with major events, like Sunday’s Daytona 500 to kick off the NASCAR Cup Series season, as the blimp. It was present at the first Daytona 500 in 1959 and has been a regular attendee ever since.
But funny thing: It’s not actually a blimp anymore. Although it will forever be known as the Goodyear Blimp, the tire and rubber company, which is a longtime official partner of NASCAR, switched aircraft models in 2014. And it’s now semi-rigid airship, a classification that means it’s technically not a blimp because of its internal frame.
“If you think about what they’ve done for the sport and the coverage they’ve provided, I think it goes all the way back to the 1955 Rose Bowl and 2,000 college football games,” ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit told For The Win in 2019.
“Even as a kid, recognizing the Goodyear Blimp when you’d go up to big games, and then when I would play in big games at Ohio State, if the Goodyear Blimp was there, you knew it was a big time game against a big time opponent.”
For The Win took a ride in the Goodyear Blimp in the week leading up to NASCAR’s first and biggest race of the season. It was a lovely ride as we took off from a small airport about 15 miles away from Daytona International Speedway and traveled to and circled the race track (which is also next-door to Daytona Beach International Airport).
But the most stunning takeaway from the flight was the blimp’s incomprehensible size. When TV broadcasts cut to the blimp, usually in the air, it’s size is not adequately conveyed. This thing is absolutely gigantic.
“I think it surprises [people] how complex it is and the teamwork that’s involved,” said Michael Dougherty, who’s been a Goodyear Blimp pilot for 13 years, while flying it. “We come up here and there’s one or two pilots, they assume there’s a camera operator, which there is. We have our own camera operators at Goodyear. But there’s also a crew of 40 folks on the ground.
“They assume it’s a hot-air balloon ride with engines. It’s really not. It’s more like flying a boat. It’s a pretty modern aircraft, especially for an airship and then the ride and visibility is so unique.”
It’s about 65 feet wide and almost 250 feet long, meaning it would take up about 82 yards on a football field. It has three engines, each with about as much horsepower as a Chevrolet Camaro ZL1.
But it floats through the air with the wind gently rocking it like a boat on the ocean.
Up close and personal with the Goodyear Blimp.Pilots and passengers use a small staircase to enter and board the gondola.Preparing for takeoff.
Essentially, the Goodyear Blimp is attached to a truck when it’s on the ground. When it’s taking off, there is a person outside the blimp who’s controlling a large cable attached to both the truck and the aircraft. He has to release the blimp for it to take off.
Taking off from New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport.What the pilots of the Goodyear Blimp see when they are looking out in front of them.Michael Dougherty has been a Goodyear Blimp pilot for 13 years.This little lever is largely how pilot Michael Dougherty controlled the blimp in flight.
“Located next to both left and right seats, these electrical controls are used to steer the Blimp left and right, up and down, using the main three tail fin control surfaces.”
“Football’s kind of fun because you can usually see what’s going on and follow the game,” Dougherty said about his favorite sporting events to fly over. “You can see a little bit of what’s going on on the field. We can also see on our screen here what the camera operator sees [out the front].”
A view of Daytona Beach, give or take, from the Goodyear Blimp.Windows!
Unlike airplanes, the Goodyear Blimp features multiple windows, which, when opened, create a delightful cross-breeze throughout the gondola. On a sunny day, it was a little toasty inside the cabin, but with the windows open, it was perfect.
The Goodyear Blimp usually flies or hovers up to 1,500 feet over the Daytona track.
When flying to a destination, the Goodyear Blimp travels at about 45 to 55 miles per hour, pilot Ryan Clarke said. But when it’s circling around Daytona International Speedway for the Daytona 500, it’s slowly cruising around at around 35 miles per hour between 1,000 and 1,500 feet off the ground.
It burns about 45 kilograms of fuel an hour, and including travel from New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport to the track, flying around the track and returning to the airport, it will use about 500 kilograms of fuel, Dougherty explained.
However, a lot of the fuel usage depends on the weather. If it’s not particularly windy and they don’t need to use the engines too much, the blimp can just hover and conserve fuel.
At this point, the Goodyear Blimp was about 2,000 feet off the ground, which is a little higher than it will be during the Daytona 500.An incredible view of Daytona International Speedway, the iconic 2.5-mile track that hosts the Daytona 500.
It’s challenging to appreciate how large Daytona International Speedway is until you see it in person. The infield of the 2.5-mile track is so massive that there’s a lake in it: Lake Lloyd, a 29-acre man-made lake that has existed since the track opened in 1959.
Just incredible.
While it was a gorgeous day for our flight, weather can be an issue for the Goodyear Blimp when it comes to the safety of those on board while providing aerial coverage.
If the blimp is already in the air, rain isn’t too much of an issue because the drops will roll right off it. However, it’s a totally different story if the blimp is still on the ground and trying to take off in inclement weather.
Because the blimp is so big, if it’s on the ground, the rain can add hundreds of pounds to the overall weight and prevent it from flying, according to Goodyear.
No photo from inside the gondola accurately conveys just how massive the Goodyear Blimp is. This one tries with the back of the blimp, but it’s so much larger than it looks.A bay window at the back of the blimp’s gondola.The Goodyear Blimp casts a shadow over Daytona Beach International Airport, which is adjacent to Daytona International Speedway.
Pilot Clarke described the Goodyear Blimp as a “big boat in the air, and it moves like one too.” More comparable to a boat than a commercial airline, the blimp ebbs and flows with the wind, like it’s riding waves in the air.
Ryan Clarke has been a pilot for Goodyear for two years. Before that, he was flying helicopters.
To provide that famous aerial coverage during major sporting events, the Goodyear Blimp has a camera attached to the front of the gondola. There is a feed for the camera operator, who works for Goodyear, inside the blimp — often the only passenger, along with two pilots — as well as the crew on the ground.
A camera attached to the nose of the gondola for the aerial coverage.From inside the blimp’s gondola, broadcast equipment is set up in front of one chair for the camera operator.
According to Goodyear, the tire company isn’t compensated for providing aerial coverage by the broadcasting channel, which is FOX for Sunday’s Daytona 500. But in turn, Goodyear doesn’t pay for the on-air plugs, which usually go something like: “Aerial coverage of the Daytona 500 provided by Goodyear” and is often accompanied by some type of on-screen graphic.
The blimp has become so synonymous with the biggest sporting events of the year that providing aerial coverage clearly has been a sound investment.
The pilots’ view from their seats. Can’t beat that.
With an incomparable view of Daytona International Speedway, the Goodyear Blimp truly offers the best view of the Daytona 500 with the whole track in sight from above.
Too bad it’s only available to the two pilots and camera operator on board.
Ever wonder what flying in an F-16 fighter jet feels like? FTW’s Michelle Martinelli took a ride with the Thunderbirds before their Daytona 500 flyover.
Ever wonder what flying in an F-16 fighter jet feels like? FTW’s Michelle Martinelli took a ride with the Thunderbirds before their Daytona 500 flyover.
