Why Don’t NASCAR Cars Have Airbags?

One could be led to believe that driving at neck break speeds around super dangerous race tracks would warrant the usage of airbags in cars. But when it comes to NASCAR, no car can be found with this safety feature in them. While it makes all the sense to install and use them in street-legal cars, how can it not be so in the fast world of motorsports?

The biggest reason for NASCAR vehicles not coming with airbags is that they are already equipped with a host of features that protect their drivers in a way that airbags can’t. Drivers are strapped and secured into their seats using a multi-point harness system that keeps them as immobile as possible. Additionally, the HANS device keeps their head, neck, and shoulders steady.

These elements balance out the need for features like airbags, which in the first place, are meant to protect the drivers’ heads in the case of an accident. How a NASCAR car differs from a street-legal car is in the driver-movement area. While drivers in the latter need to have the flexibility to move around and check their blind spots to have an awareness of their surroundings, it is the opposite in NASCAR.

NASCAR drivers need to be as bound and stationary as possible when they are racing. This makes airbags an unnecessary feature to have in race cars.

The safety on these cars is amazing. pic.twitter.com/sKIYJuPV3i

— NASCAR (@NASCAR) July 31, 2022

Can it help to have airbags, and the other features in a NASCAR car that make it safe

Airbags are completely avoided from even being installed in NASCAR vehicles for the reason that they might end up creating more problems instead of helping with the cause. Being a close contact sport where cars love finding their way into each other, airbags, if present, could be deployed very often. The problem with this is that the deployed bags could then obstruct the driver’s field of vision and potentially create a more lethal situation.

Apart from the 7-point harness system and the HANS system, cars also come with a roll cage, a one-body chassis, advanced communication systems, open windows with nettings, and so on. Joe Gibbs Racing recently took it their social media channels to talk about the three essential parts in the Next-Gen car that kept drivers safe: The front clip, the rear clip, and the center section.

Designed with a huge number of brackets, metal plates, and tubes, the body of a NASCAR car can absorb strong impacts as much as it can stay sturdy in the face of it.