NVirkkula wrote:
But changing that wall alone is not as simple as it might sound.
I'm going to guess (armchair quarterbacking, of course
) that the wall height of the SAFER barrier and the wall height of the original concrete wall are kind of linked... the outer layer of the SAFER barrier is 8 inch steel tubing, and 5 of those welded together is pretty close to the typical race track retaining wall sizes I can Google (generally around the 3 ft range it seems). So increasing the height of this would probably be a massive undertaking. That being said, for Pocono at least the safety fence in that section could be replaced by something more solid and less car-shredding, as you don't have to worry about the grandstands. It still might be a pricey endeavor though... any sort of solid wall would have to be able to handle 3400 lb stock cars thrown at it as well.
(Showing my age, I remember when Pocono was lined with only boilerplate walls, one of the reasons CART left the track to begin with. So things *have* improved over the years.
)