His safety innovations have saved countless racers’ lives
By Jim Donnelly
 If the moment ever comes when The Big Guy Upstairs decides to
designate a patron saint for speed crazies, you can bet the whole
portfolio that Bill Simpson will be beatified on the spot. It may be
the only time that “Simpson” and “sainthood” occupy the same thought
simultaneously.
Simpson has been equally hardcore about racing and life itself,
experiencing both to the fullest, and has dedicated his own
existence and millions of his own dollars to safeguarding the lives
of his fellow competitors. He is a very plain-spoken individual,
tough at work and play, and decidedly not given to
self-congratulation. He still concedes that worldwide, there are
likely thousands of racers walking around today who might have died
if they hadn’t been using his helmets, fire-resistant suits or
personal restraint systems.
Simpson’s four-decade-plus career was launched when he nearly became
a casualty himself. A native of Redondo Beach, California, he
attended his first drag race as a teen-ager in 1955 and was
immediately hooked. The attitude toward driver protection in all
forms of motorsports in those days could be described as blissful
ignorance. Drag racers wore jeans, leather jackets, military-surplus
goggles and Cromwell helmets whose sides could be pushed inward with
finger pressure – or no headgear at all.
“It was at San Fernando Dragway,” he recalled. “I had a problem, and
I couldn’t get it stopped, and it kind of hurt me.”
What happened was this: Simpson had graduated from street cars to
all-out dragsters. On one run in 1958, his race car’s engine
exploded with enough force to shear the crankshaft in two. Its
compression lost, the dragster freewheeled into the shutdown area at
full speed. The brake handle broke off in Simpson’s hand. He smashed
into a dump at the end of the strip, and a huge timber tore through
the car and badly broke both his arms.
While recuperating, Simpson remembered that the Air Force used
parachutes to stop jets on short runways, and that some racers were
actually experimenting with them. An uncle who owned a
military-surplus store suggested he make his own cross-form
parachutes. With a rented sewing machine and a stock of ripstop
nylon, Simpson stitched together a prototype and with his best
friend, dragster pilot Mike Sorokin, tested it by dumping it from
the back of his Chevy wagon, attached to the tow hitch, while
Sorokin charged down a street at 100 mph. The chute was too big for
the car’s weight, jerked it airborne and sent it crashing into a
tree nursery. Both racers ended up in jail, but at 18, Simpson was
in the safety equipment business.
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He was
also still racing, having branched out into SCCA road-course
competition. That’s where Simpson met NASA astronaut Pete Conrad, an
amateur racer who would later command the Apollo 12 moon mission.
Conrad knew that Simpson was now also marketing aluminized firesuits
based on welding gear to drag racers, and tipped him off about a new
material Du Pont had developed at NASA’s request to protect
spacecraft from atmospheric friction on re-entry. It was called
Nomex, and Simpson was the first to create a viable firesuit from it
that not only offered legitimate protection, but also could be worn
in long-distance races. He first took samples to Indianapolis in
1967. The first two drivers to try them were A.J. Foyt and Dan
Gurney, but by race day, all but three of the 33 starters were
wearing them.
One of them, eventually, was Simpson, who advanced from the SCCA to
Indy cars, and qualified for his first Indianapolis 500 in 1974.
With an ex-Penske McLaren, he led the 1976 California 500. But while
practicing at Indy in ’77, he began losing his mental focus,
thinking about his business, what would happen if he was hurt. He’d
long ago experienced the sudden loss of racing, when Sorokin was
killed in 1968 by his fueler’s disintegrating rear end.
In the ensuing years, Simpson went on to develop more than 200
safety products, including new generations of Nomex suits (which he
demonstrated by donning and having himself set afire), arm
restraints, neck collars, the first 3-inch-wide shoulder harnesses
for Sprint car drivers, and the first carbon fiber helmet. Despite a
worldwide reputation for quality and research, Simpson still found
himself defending lawsuits, many of them frivolous. His worst
crisis, though, came on Feb. 18, 2001, when Dale Earnhardt was
killed on the final corner of the Daytona 500.
NASCAR publicly insisted that Earnhardt died because his
Simpson-manufactured lap belt separated, a contention contradicted
by several experts on traumatic injuries. Simpson argued that
Earnhardt, his longtime friend, had ignored instructions on proper
belt installation. He severed his ties with Simpson Race Products,
in which investment bankers had purchased a majority interest in
1999, and sued NASCAR for defamation. In September 2001, he started
a new safety business, Impact Racing, and last summer, the suit was
settled out of court.
“When Earnhardt got killed, I voiced my opinions, but the people at
Simpson didn’t want to listen to me,” he said. “NASCAR’s not my
friends, and I’m not theirs, but that’s all passed. I don’t build
this equipment for sanction bodies; I build it for race drivers. But
I will say that since all this happened, there’s not another
organization doing as much work on protecting its drivers as NASCAR.
They’re working hard, which shows that even tragedies can become
positives.” |
