"You have drivers who make their living driving these race cars. But if they bitch too much, the owner's going to tell them, 'If you don’t like it, get out and I'll get somebody else to drive.' I'm fortunately in a position to where I love to drive... and I've made a great living at it. But I could tell them to go pound sand, too, and my kids are going to eat and nobody's going to repossess my house. I'm in a unique situation," Scelzi said. "So a lot of these guys actually go to me to be a mouthpiece and stick my neck out there. My problem is, being a short-tempered Italian, I let my emotions get in the way of my thinking sometimes and I start out the conversations wrong with maybe the wrong tone of voice or my approach isn't right. But sometimes when you talk and you talk and you talk and things falls on deaf ears, the emotion takes over."
What he said he wants to guard against is every racer's tendency to ignore the unsafe elements of what's a relatively protected sport.
"It's the same story as it's been since the beginning of time: Our hearts are broken. We're saddened. We don’t like to see what we're going to see. But we jump right back in these cars and we go do what we have to do," the four-time series champion said. "It's no different than a Friday night run when I know I can't see and . . . if I don’t get this car down there tonight, I'm not going to be in the show tomorrow because it's going to be hot. So I'm going to push it to the limit. I don’t want to be the one to admit in front of my kids and my family, but you know what? I do it every Friday night.
"Fortunately for us this year, the bitching and griping and moaning that we've done, NHRA has moved the schedules up. And now I haven't run on a night session on a racetrack where I can't see," the Mopar/Oakley Dodge driver from Don Schumacher Racing said. "So there's been some good that's been done, and I don’t want it to stop."
Slipping into complacency is a concern, too.
"It seems like things go by. You have a fatality and then... you get in the middle of the points chase and the battle and dadadadada and people forget," Scelzi said. "That's why the sanctioning body is who I hold responsible and I believe needs a person constantly going to update things."
An excellent candidate is Whit Bazemore. Why not put him in charge of track safety assurance? NHRA has the money to do it. He has the right idea about keeping drivers safe, and he isn’t driving right now. NHRA should copy John Force, probably the smartest businessman in the industry -- hire your loudest critic. (Force did it in hiring Gary Densham, who had objected to a third Funny Car in the JFR organization.)
The only catch in this case is that Bazemore might not want to sully his reputation as a credible individual. Just the same, Bazemore would inspire confidence in the racers.
Bazemore, Scelzi's former teammate at Don Schumacher Racing, declared in 2004 that he was looking at self-preservation options in the wake of two dozen tire-chunking incidents. He said, "The person with the last ounce of responsibility for my well-being is myself." He said he'd "rather wake up tomorrow and not have a job" than the reverse.
At the time he said NHRA's response was "a Band-Aid -- and this patient requires open-heart surgery."