Following last week’s spectacular crash involving Jeff Gordon, safety has once again become a major concern throughout the NASCAR garage. This time the focus has shifted to the track and more specifically the retaining walls around every track.

In the latter stages of Sunday’s UAW-Dodge 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Gordon turned to avoid a spinning Matt Kenseth and drove head-on into the inside wall, sending his car spiraling violently out of control and showering the track with debris.

To make matters worse, Gordon made contact with the inside wall just at an opening for safety vehicles. Safety workers quickly arrived on the scene, and luckily Gordon was able to walk away sore but unharmed.

“It was the hardest I’ve ever hit in that direction,” the four-time champion said of the incident. “In this situation, it was they way you hit and it’s all in the seat belts and Hans device. They did their job and I’m very thankful for that.”

“I hope that Monday morning, every race track was thinking about what do we have that could be like that, that we need to work on and fix” Gordon continued. “We’re going to see what tracks react and which ones don’t. And I’m going to come down hard on the ones that don’t, I’ll tell you that.”

As the series made its way to the Atlanta Motor Speedway this weekend drivers began to voice their concerns about this incident and its ramifications. Richard Childress Racing’s Jeff Burton called Gordon’s incident “inexcusable.”

Placing blame on all parties involved – NASCAR, track owners and drivers – Burton argued, “When we don’t let history teach us, then we’re being hard-headed and that’s what happened last week. The implementation of soft walls on the interior wall is something we have to move toward and the continued study of the shape and design and the impact angle of the wall is something we have to move forward with. This is something that is inexcusable to me.”

The problem most drivers have with the openings for safety vehicles is the angle at which the wall is built at some tracks. At the opening, the wall parallel to the track ends and another starts at a 45 degree angle before becoming parallel once again. Rusty Wallace demonstrated on EPSN last week how the wall has been constructed at his Iowa Speedway to fix this situation. At Iowa, as well as some other tracks, the opening for safety vehicles is hidden by an alley way created by offsetting the second wall behind the first.

Gordon went on to point out, “You hope a bad accident is a bad accident and that it gets looked at seriously no matter who is driving the car or what happens. But I will say that if it takes me going through that and stepping up and saying something to get it fixed, then I’m just going to play my part.

“[But] it’s how you handle it from this day forward at not just [Bruton Smith’s] tracks, but at all the tracks. So I hope that everybody takes notice of that and that we can make progress from this point on.”