The week before the race, Tony Stewart spoke out on the subject of cautions for debris, finally airing out a smoldering issue. But nobody debates the need for debris cautions at the 2.66-mile Talladega track, where the only way to race on it safely is to not race there at all.

Selling tickets or buying tickets to exciting races has always trumped safety, which is why the grandstands are always full at Talladega. If it weren’t a circus of thrills, nobody would bother to show up — including all those guys in the garage. As for those unnecessary debris cautions for such things as a piece of tape on the track in Phoenix, they’re all about selling exciting races on TV. So spare us, dear NASCAR, the pep talks on safety.

The Talladega race was decided ultimately by the caution thrown just before the end of the regulation distance for black debris, the oil put down from the smoldering Toyota of David Reutimann. The Camry crowd is blowing up when they do make the races, which usually is about 50 percent of the time. But the great equalizer — the Talladega draft — demonstrated that Toyota is at least gaining on it as Reutimann made himself at home in the lead draft before his demise.

The smoking Toyota set up the green-white-checker finish, where race winner Jeff Gordon was the beneficiary of the caution shortly after the green and long before the white or checkers. Why didn’t they let them keep racing at Talladega just as they did at the Daytona 500? Evidently, safety at Daytona wasn’t the key issue. We were down with that because it was a helluva finish for the Daytona 500. We’d be up for no yellows for a piece of tape, too.

Virtually all drivers are side-drafting and riding in the middle lane at Talladega these days, the real tribute to the genius of Dale Earnhardt. The inventor of both these tactics, Dale called it “raking” when it came to side-drafting. Alas, it’s not much of a thinking crowd that throws beer cans at Gordon for winning his 77th race and surpassing the mark of, well, a guy whose been in stock car racing heaven for over six years now.

“The people throwing the beer cans should go out in the parking lot and wail away at their own car with a couple of beers if that’s what they want to do,” said Dale Earnhardt Jr., making sense of nonsense as usual.

Everybody is side-drafting with the exception of Ryan Newman, who once again back-drafted Juan Pablo Montoya into the fence. Montoya’s Dodge ended up with a Talladega stripe, i.e. no paint on the right side. In this case, Newman can plead innocent due to the “momentum” of the draft. But in his heart, Montoya knows he owes Newman one. Everybody else knows this as well. So this situation could get interesting, including the car owner angle of Chip Ganassi versus Roger Penske.

In a sport all about speed and self-made men, it’s nonsensical to have guaranteed starting positions for the top 35 drivers based on a car owner’s point standings, especially at Talladega. With apologies to the limp-wristed comedy Talladega Nights, this sounds like a rulebook made up by an effete Frenchman. Not only does this rule keep out half the Toyotas. It means the guys who do qualify at Talladega have done so because they’ve spent every practice session in qualifying trim. When they make the races, their cars are nervous wrecks waiting to happen with qualifying set-ups underneath them due to the impound rules. So spare us the pep talks on safety and let it rip with the fastest 43 drivers. Then put the final practice session back in one hour after qualifying is over.

And speaking of safety, one of those irrepressible guys now behind microphones and no longer behind the wheel have suggested that throwing those beer cans during the cool down lap could hurt somebody. Yeah, somebody’s arm maybe. It hurts my ears to hear them providing instant analysis without the facts about such things as just how Casey Mears crashed. As of Sunday evening, Mears and teammate Jimmie Johnson had two diametrically opposed stories, one of which cannot be correct. Should make for an interesting team meeting at Hendrick Motorsports between those two this week. Meanwhile, teammate Gordon can look forward to what is shaping up to be one of those years when the breaks fall in the direction of a championship.

Jonathan Ingram can be reached at jingram666@cs.com.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that motor racing once again faces a new frontier when it comes to safety. The recent press conference outlining the causes behind the tragic death of NHRA driver Eric Medlen has put the problem of head movement and brain injuries back into the center stage.

Just when we thought this problem had been resolved by the use of cockpit surrounds, the HANS device and soft walls i.e. the SAFER barrier, Medlen died from the sideways movement of his helmeted head in a freak testing incident aboard one of the Funny Cars of John Force’s team. A punctured tire that remained on the rim caused the severe oscillation of the vehicle that cost Medlen his life.

It was just over twenty years ago that this writer first started to focus on head injuries when a longtime friend and competitor, Butch Lindley, suffered a crippling brain injury from side impact in a short track crash. The two-time NASCAR Late Model Sportsman champion (which became the Busch Series) spent several years comatose in a hospital before succombing to the injury. Not long afterward, another longtime friend and competitor, Gene Felton, was lucky to survive a broken neck suffered at Riverside during a Trans-Am weekend.

Sadly, it wasn’t until the deaths of superstar drivers Ayrton Senna and Dale Earnhardt that the safety landscape eventually was changed and the attitude of sanctioning bodies. Otherwise, we probably still wouldn’t have many of the improvements now in place.

In one of those quirky aspects of the legal system, the previous fear was losing a major law suit over the death of any participant. If you don’t have a safety rule, went this old school reasoning, the safety rule can’t fail and leave the door open for legal recourse.

In 2000, for one sad example of this old school thinking, NASCAR initially tried to build a temporary facility as its technical center in a rented building following three deaths from head and neck injuries in each of its major series in 2000, including that fatal crash of Adam Petty. Not until Earnhardt died from a similar head injury at Daytona in 2001 did NASCAR commit to its current full-scale Technical Center and the commitment to driver safety that has resulted in the Car of Tomorrow.

Last week’s media conference to provide background detail to Medlen’s accident included Graham Light of the NHRA as well as John Force, team members and John Melvin, an engineer and longtime consultant on the biomechanics of racing injuries. This line-up and the media conference itself indicates the sanctioning body is taking the problem very seriously. It also bodes well for an assault on the last remaining frontier of serious head injuries in racing: the sudden sideways movement of the head under g-loading.

The HANS device has caused a literal revolution in safety by directly curing the problem of the forward launching of the head. (I would mention an alternative to the HANS, but it looks far more like a circumvention of the HANS patent than an equally protective device.) But no head restraint currently on the market fully addresses the issue of the sideways movement of the head.

Higher cockpit surrounds in F1 and American single seaters, as well as better seats in sprints and midgets plus NASCAR vehicles also contribute more safety to the issue of sideways head movement — which generally is more of a yaw than a direct “shoulder to shoulder” type of movement due to human anatomy. The SAFER barriers, by reducing g-loads upon impact, also indirectly help reduce the transfer of g-loads.

Another development to be applauded in the short term is the use of foam inserts in the door of NASCAR’s new Cars of Tomorrow and one additional steel bar — as well as placing the seat several inches more toward the center of the car. This will decrease the problem of head injuries from side impact such as those suffered by Bobby Allison in 1988 at Pocono as well as Steve Park’s career-slowing injury at Darlington.

All these developments underscore the need to keep working on the remaining problem of the sideways movement of the head. Here’s hoping those with the means and technical know-how are working on something a driver can use to eliminate it by direct means. Further, I hope sanctioning bodies don’t wait to embrace such technology until another tragedy occurs.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to report John Force, who has never worn a head restraint of any kind, has decided to start wearing one.

Jonathan Ingram can be reached at jingram666@cs.com.

The view from here on what kind of followers NASCAR will attract in the future with the Car of Tomorrow.

1) The new NASCAR fan will follow drivers, not cars or brands. If all the cars are the same, i.e. the Car of Tomorrow, then the drivers are the only focus left.

2) The new NASCAR fan will look at the racing in the 1960’s in the same way NFL fans currently think of the leather helmet era or NBA fans look at the 76ers of Wilt Chamberlain versus the Celtics of Red Auerbach. The big cars at Daytona were unique and different, the history formed the foundation, but… .

3) Despite some recent political setbacks, the new NASCAR fan remains more likely to see races locally in the New York City, Seattle and Denver markets — and less likely to see two races a year at Martinsville or Richmond.

4) The next generation of NASCAR fans will be roughly three times more likely (than at present) to be African-American or Latin. They will be twice as likely to be Canadian. On the other hand, they’re unlikely to be Drifters, who are, with all due respect, car nuts.

5) The new NASCAR fan will be more likely to follow football (college and the NFL) than, say, the Indy 500, because there’s only so much time to go around. Virtually none of them will be able to tell the precise difference between Champ Cars or Indy cars, their origin or history. Some may come to see these latter two as just a couple more feeder series.

6) Male and female, the next generation of fans will be more likely to race — electronically.

7) The new NASCAR fan will also be more likely to sit in a suite at a race, be associated with a corporate sponsor and to be more excited by the big event and the crashes than the race itself.

8) The new NASCAR fan will not mind when the factories start fielding their own multi-car teams — as long as they hire their favorite drivers.

9) The new NASCAR fans will not mind more Japanese and European manufacturers participating or drivers from the same origins. As long as those drivers are fast and cool… .

10) The new NASCAR fan will not expect their drivers to get killed or have a career summarily shortened by serious injury despite increasingly impressive speeds.

11) As long as the show is good, the new NASCAR fans — just like the old NASCAR fans — will be cynical but not irate when NASCAR manipulates the rules for the sake of promoting the sport.

Jonathan Ingram can be reached at jingram666@cs.com