Inside Out: a ride in the AMA’s Safety Car

We used to call them “pace cars,” but for 2009, AMA Pro Road Racing relabeled them “safety cars” and gave them a larger role than ever in the series—a move than initially freaked out nearly everyone who’d been around long enough to remember that putting cars on track with motorcycles has a way of going badly (and publicly) wrong. But just as the paddock was starting to get used to the various passenger cars that escorted them onto the track for practice sessions and rolling starts or that came out to keep them rolling while an on-track situation was rectified, series CEO Roger Edmondson told teams (in a Friday meeting at Barber Motorsports Park) that it looked like they’d be switching from safety cars to safety motorcycles within two to three rounds. So, it seemed like a good time to catch a ride in a rolling swan song and, yes, take a cheesy picture of myself wearing a radio headset. Like Top Gun, but in the same model of car my grandma drove.

First, though, we had to live through being sideswiped by a tornado (“severe and dangerous tornado schedule to arrive at Barber Motorsports Park, 2:10 p.m.,” said the Weather Channel), which the journalists accomplished by backing away from the large bank of plate-glass windows and losing some of their dignity to thin and nervous jokes until the sky ceased to look like the end of the world. After the wall of black clouds that had surged over the treeline like godzilla receded (along with the heavy rains and winds and the electrically charged air that made the umbrella girls’ hair stand on end), I jumped in the safety car—in this case a blue Honda Accord—with the AMA’s Dan Argano (at left in the photo) and his co-driver, Walter Walker. Their mission: get the Daytona SportBike field up to speed for a Race 2 rolling start. My mission, according to AMA Pro Road Race Director of Competition Colin Fraser’s succinct pre-ride briefing, was to wear my seatbelt and not throw up. Mission accomplished!

At Barber, the pace car reaches speeds up to 100mph, which isn’t much compared to some tracks—Daytona, for example, where riders have to fight to keep their bikes on the bankings if speeds dip much lower—but is about as fast as I really want to go in a stock Honda Accord with screeching tires, especially when trying to shoot pictures out the rear window. Argano is unphased by all the screeching (“The traction control won’t let me do much,” he sighs) but it’s music to the ears of the riders, who prefer a fast pace car and warm tires.

The safety car’s co-driver traditionally appears to fans as a disembodied arm waving riders past in the event of a restart, but inside the car, Walker and other co-drivers are responsible for things like calling race control, turning the yellow flashers on the car’s roof off and on, and controlling the red and green lights mounted to the car’s rear window that signal riders to pass or stay put. The radio channel they’re tuned to keeps chatter to a minimum—safety-car updates, a few rider-down announcements—and seems ruled for the most part by AMA Pro’s head grid official, Beth Miller, who sticks to brief statements and echoes of confirmation save for one complete sentence uttered pre-race, from the grid: “Marshals, will you please remind your riders in back that the racing starts after they cross the line, and not before?” (She said it in that sweet way that means “or else.”)

Finally, the safety car dives onto the track followed by Superpole winner Jason DiSalvo, Jamie Hacking, and Chaz Davies, the rest of the field streaming out behind them. The spectacle is nothing to sneeze at—the storm’s withdrawal has left the track gleaming and the landscape a violent green, and the few brave fans who toughed out the wannabe natural disaster by hiding in their cars cheer as the riders fly by. At the final turn, the car drops off into the pits while the ribbon of riders carries on, swarming onto the front straight as Dan and Walter watch them go. “Looks good,” says Dan. “Smooth start,” Walter agrees.

The pair stays buckled in for the duration of each race in case race control suddenly tells them to “stand up” in response to a situation (and in the American Superbike race immediately following this one, they’re called out to corral the field while an ambulance takes Rockstar Makita Suzuki’s Blake Young off the field post-crash). For now, though, they sit twisted in their seats so they can keep an eye on the scoreboard while discussing who they think is likely to do well this year, pausing whenever their headsets crackle. The white flag is thrown and the two click off their seatbelts. “Now that’s a beautiful sight,” says Walker.