Six Years of The Orange Cone

It was July 29, 2011 when I brought The Orange Cone to Twitter. Six years ago. Where has the time gone?

The Cone started as a joke at The Rumble in Ft Waybe in December, 2005 and eventually found it's way to MySpace in 2006. Sometime around 2008, the Cone went dormant and stayed that way for a few years until Carl Edwards hit the commitment cone at Lucas Oil Raceway in the final Nationwide Series race at that venue.

I remember with great joy what it was like when I hit 1,000 followers. I thought I was Big Time. I did a lot right. I had no idea how Twitter really worked but I engaged, dropped mentions as frequently as I could, and built a pretty solid foundation. But I made a lot of mistakes then, with some mean-spirited and frankly unfunny comments. Hell, sometimes I still do. Take the good with the bad, right?

But never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined what this would lead to. A ton of new friends, ranging from multiple-time Cup Series champions and Indy 500 winners to hobby stock drivers, to event promoters, journalists, broadcasters, series executives and officials, and best of all, thousands upon thousands of race fans.

At the end of the day, I am a fan. I always will be, too. I get excited every time they say "drivers start your engines", whether it's Cup, IndyCar, IMSA, ARCA, World of Outlaws, USAC, or some unsanctioned event at some dusty short track in middle America. Racing is a way of life, and anyone who chooses that life is okay with me.

Yeah, I get that we'll disagree from time to time. There's things I've learned not to discuss, including politics and religion. I still do, from time to time, but I've made the conscious effort to not go down those roads. I get we'll disagree on things we see on the racetrack too. That's part of the fun. I really work on trying to disagree without being disagreeable. It's not always easy, and I am sure I don't always pull it off, but it's the goal.

One of the things I've learned over the last six years, mostly over the past couple, is that the follower count doesn't matter. It's neat to say you have thousands of followers, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter at all. What does matter is the quality of your interactions. I am fortunate to interact with a lot of people all day long.

Here's some unsolicited advice to those who want to know how to build their Twitter presence. Have an opinion. Be vocal. But don't make it personal. I hope everyone knows I love NASCAR. Seriously, I think I am the luckiest guy in the world to do this and get to be involved, even tangentially. There are things they do that I really love, and a few things they do I really dislike.

When I see something I don't like, I say I don't like it but I try not to get personal with anything. Decisions are made by people I know and like, and even if they're things I disagree with, I still like the people who make those calls. I hope they understand my goal isn't to question them or their intelligence, as so many others do, but rather give an alternative point of view.

How much longer will this go? Who knows. It started as a way to entertain myself. That anyone else found it entertaining was a nice bonus, and I am still having fun and apparently a few of you still are too. So we'll keep on going with the same tired jokes and the same insipid commentary.

Thanks for hitting that follow button. It meant a lot to me when you did and it means a lot to me now. Here's to another six years...at least.

How to end races safety but under green

Friday night's Truck Series race is another in a long list of examples of why NASCAR needs to revamp its procedures for caution flags on the last lap of a race. Rather than ending the race at a pre-determined point on the track, the start-finish line, the race ended at some random point on the track when the caution came out on the final lap. 

In theory, NASCAR's overtime procedure is there to give fans "unlimited" attempts at a green flag finish. In execution, NASCAR's overtime procedure all but ensures if there is an incident on the final lap of a race the fans will not see a green flag finish, And in this humble cone's opinion, if you say you're going to give the fans a green flag finish, well, we need to give the fans a green flag finish.

So how do we do it but do it safely?

Well, first, we need to ensure we aren't racing back through an accident zone. Some fans think we should race back to the checkered flag regardless, and I used to think that way, but that's not a possibility anymore. So no racing back to the checkered when the yellow comes out on the last lap.

That doesn't mean we end under yellow though. But the solution is really simple. If the caution comes out any time in the final two laps, including on the last lap before the checkered flag, we need to freeze the field, clear the track, line them back up and do it all over again. As many times as it takes. Yes, UNLIMITED attempts at a Green-White-Checkered finish.

The overtime line can still be used to determine a clean restart. Call it "the restart line" and if they wreck before the cross that line, realign the field in the positions they were in and do it again. But in my opinion it should have no bearing in when the race finishes.

There is always the "but, what if we're there until Tuesday night trying to get a finish?" Yeah, what if? How about we look at history and let that guide us instead of nonsense.

Only once in the Truck Series' nine-year history of unlimited GWC attempts was there more than three attempts. The last race before unlimited attempts were outlawed by rule was at Gateway in 2004 and it had an unbelievable four attempts, and every fan there that night and those watching on TV still talk about the finish of that race.

If we aren't going to finish under green, that's also fine. Just end the race at the advertised distance every time. I am 100% okay with that too. But if we say we are going to finish under green, we need to finish under green. And races need to finish at the same place each and every week, at the start-finish line. If we don't disqualify "winners" for failing post-race tech because the fans deserve to leave the track knowing who won, then they also deserve to know where on the track those winners will be determined.

Yes, I am a buffoon but I do take driver safety seriously

Passion drives motorsports. Whether it's the drive to win, the desire to cheer for - or against - a driver, or the desire to make things safer, passion is always there.

So when we see a massive crash, as we did in Sunday's Indianapolis 500, passionate commentary on social media comes to the forefront. Some of it carries weight and moves the narrative forward. Some of it is uninformed and does nothing but give some instant gratification for the poster.

The safety debate is a mysterious one to me, because I've yet to find anyone in the sport who thinks it's "too safe." There are people whose job, 24 hours a day seven days a week, is to make things safer. The drivers, whose asses are strapped into these 200 mph rocketships, want to know when they go barreling off into the turn that they're going to come out the other side, even if things go askew before they get to the next straightaway. And me, an unemployed former motorsports journalist without an editor, well, I know thousands of racecar drivers. Literally thousands. I want each and every one of them to race, and occasionally crash, and go home to their wives, their husbands, their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their children, their dog or their cat, and their friends each and every weekend. 

But I know that's not always going to be the case.

Yes, this is a dangerous sport. Sadly, there will inevitably a driver that pays the ultimate price behind the wheel of a racecar. No matter what safety advances we make, it's going to happen. Containment seats, headrests, HANS devices, SAFER barriers, energy-dissipating zones built into the chassis, improved helmets, you name it, it all works wonders. And at some point, it's not going to be enough. There will be some set of unforeseen circumstances that conspire to take away one of our heroes.

And it sucks. 

We should learn all we can from every accident, whether it involves injury or not. Maybe lessons learned in some seemingly meaningless incident will help someone down the road in a more significant incident. That's how it should, and truthfully does, work.

So when Scott Dixon sailed over Jay Howard and flew the length of a football field into the catch fencing, landing in top of the wall with the side of the tub, it was no real surprise that many watching said Indycar racing is just too dangerous and we need to do something to make it safer for the drivers.

Paul Dana perished in a crash at Homestead in 2006

Is Indycar racing dangerous? Sure it is. The cars are 230 mph rocketships racing between concrete walls on a track that was designed and built when cars could barely break 80 mph. While NASCAR has had an unprecedented streak of good fortune when it comes to driver fatalities since 2001, Indycar has lost four drivers in accidents over that same span (Tony Renna, Paul Dana, Dan Wheldon, and Justin Wilson). 

Wilson's death at Pocono may be the one that causes the most consternation, and honestly it should. He was not involved in a crash, he was merely passing by an accident scene when the nose cone of another car literally fell out of the sky and hit him in the head, causing fatal head injuries. Many observers say that is the accident that proves we need canopies on these cars, to ensure that never happens again.

I must make this clear: I am not opposed to canopies. I have seen designs with canopies incorporated and many of them look really cool. But here's my concern: what happens when the car flips and lands with the canopy wedged next to the wall and is fully engulfed in fire? What happens if there's a fuel spill and the cockpit fills with methanol and it ignites? I can think of many more instances where a canopy becomes a hindrance that could cost a driver his or her life.

And here's the puzzling thing: I've yet to see one active Indycar driver who has come out completely in favor of enclosing the cockpits. Maybe they're all buffoons, as I apparently am. But one would think the opinion of the men and women who do this, whose lives are on the line, would mean something.

Yes, many drivers were opposed to head and neck restrains back in 2001. NASCAR drivers were outspoken about full-face helmets in that era too. But safety wasn't the priority back then as it is now. Drivers are much more informed about their own personal safety and the risks involved than they were then. So when no Indycar driver will go on record saying he or she won't compete unless and until the cockpits are enclosed, that carries some weight with me.

Racing is a dangerous game. The risks are high, but so are the rewards. Why do these Indycar drivers risk it all? Everyone has their own reasons, but the will to win and have their likeness forever etched onto the Borg-Warner Trophy is surely a driving factor. Many of them (not all, I know) have achieved great personal wealth too. For others, it's chasing a dream. In any case, to them, those rewards make the risks acceptable. 

Sometimes people do things that make no sense, and that's okay.

Why do people walk on tightropes over the Grand Canyon? Why do people jump out of airplanes? Why do people climb Mt. Everest? Why do people tie a bungee cord to their ankles and jump off a bridge? Who knows, but no one forces any of them to do it. Same thing with driving racecars. I have yet to meet a single racecar driver who is there against his or her will. They know the unique risks their chosen thrill carries, and they have accepted them. They make the choice to do it. 

Whether you're a journalist covering the sport, a mechanic building the cars, or a fan with a Twitter account, your concern for their safety indeed carries weight, but the drivers know the risks and do it anyhow. I, for one, respect that choice. It doesn't mean I don't want to see it be as safe as it can be, not by a long shot.Scott Dixon is very lucky to walk away from an accident that could have easily had a much worse outcome. It's a game of inches, and the inches were in his favor. Had anything else been different, we could be saying goodbye to another of our heroes. But I could also say that had anything else been different at Pocono in 2015, Justin Wilson would have been racing on Sunday. The inches, sadly, were not in his favor and we're all the poorer for it to this day. 

So what is the answer to driver safety? Well, there isn't one. It's never going to be "safe." And that's okay. If the human body was designed to go 230 mph, we wouldn't need a car to do it. So we use the safety apparatus that is available now. We continue to learn and to innovate, and continue to make gains when and were we can. Maybe one day there will be a canopy that achieves everything we need it to achieve without compromising safety in other areas. I don't think there's a single driver that would be opposed to that.

I know this may not be a popular opinion, and that's okay. I may be a buffoon, and that's okay too. But what I am not is someone that hasn't spent time pondering this and developing my opinion on this through experience. It's the product of 44 years of being around racing. It's the product of conversations with thousands of racecar drivers, seeing millions of laps in thousands of races at hundreds of racetracks. Call me names if you must, just don't call me someone who doesn't care and doesn't put a lot of time and energy and thought into this sport.