Why Do NASCAR Cars Have Plastic Wraps on Their Windshields? Exploring How Tear-Offs Aid Drivers During Races

During a 1994 race at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, Bill Elliott’s windshield cracked after being hit by debris on the track. His crew initially applied adhesive tape to the broken glass and sent him on his way to finish the event. While it sounds heroic, it was a dangerous practice. The learnings from such incidents are why NASCAR today races with polycarbonate windshields, along with several layers of plastic wrap on top.

However, the role of the plastic wrap which is often seen being ripped off the glass by pit crew members during a race also serves a separate purpose apart from the safety of the driver itself. The tear-offs help the drivers get a clear view out of the car as pit crew members rip them off, taking all the dirt, debris, and tire marbles collected during a race off the windshield in one quick action.

The late Steve Peterson, former technical director of NASCAR, was one of the many left impressed with these films. He said, “There were times when we first started using Lexan that we would have to change the windshield between the Happy Hour session and race morning and put a new windshield in because it would become so scarred and scratched.”

“But in the last 10 years, there has been the addition of the clear overlay windshield tear-offs. Those have become optically perfect,” he added. Not more than five films are added to the windshield. The higher the number, the less visibility the driver gets. Another major advancement on windshields came back in 2013. The single-piece Lexan shields were replaced by shields built in two stages. 

The new product uses two 0.118-inch thick pieces of Lexan and binds them together with a polymer film in between. This massively improves the strength of the shield. This wasn’t necessarily a much-needed improvement, but rather a move that NASCAR’s safety team made to make use of the technology that was available to them.

The windshields on the first NASCAR cars in 1948 were made of tempered glass. In the 1950s, a safer product made by placing a vinyl sheet between two pieces of glass became prevalent. Forty years later, in the 1990s, a major update was made with the introduction of polycarbonate windshields under the brand name Lexan.

This new material provided drivers with great safety but was extremely scratch-prone. Even the softest materials could scratch it and affect drivers’ visibility. Teams first began applying adhesive films to prevent this. Tabs separated the films and could be removed one after the other based on race conditions.

Patalak is the current Director of Safety Engineering at NASCAR. He said, “Sometimes we have opportunities to be proactive, like the laminate windshield. That wasn’t necessarily tied to one specific incident where we were responding to an injury or an issue, but it was an opportunity we saw and realized that with the technology we have available to us we could make that part better and safer.”

Every driver on the track is now safer inside their cars thanks to the work of the safety team. With beer cans, hoardings, and other such debris constantly finding their way onto the race track, it is essential to make sure that they don’t affect the drivers or their performance. The wraps that are stuck on the windshields make sure of that along with the Lexan polycarbonate material.