On April 24, 2010, Mike Walker, a co-owner of Blake Housley’s Pro Nitrous team, was critically injured in a pit incident during the ADRL Georgia Drags at South Georgia Motorsports Park. He was transported to nearby Memorial Hospital of Adel, where he was subsequently pronounced dead.

Mike Walker

Those are the facts as we know them right now. Local authorities are investigating the incident, and in time the full details of what happened will come to light. For the moment, eyewitness reports from the track describe an apparent nitrous bottle failure in the pits during a refill, with the carbon-fiber wrapped tank flying high into the air and landing some distance away. No matter what the cause, the tragedy underscores the fact that the racetrack can be a dangerous place, even when we do everything right.

In the armed forces, when a serious accident occurs it’s not uncommon to have a “stand-down” in the immediate aftermath, when everyone in that branch of the service stops their normal activities to focus on safety. Even if the cause of the incident isn’t yet known, it’s an opportunity for everyone to examine what they’re doing and try to identify what Mike Mullane, a retired Air Force Colonel and veteran of three Space Shuttle flights, describes as “Normalized Deviance.” In a talk to the International Association of Fire Fighters in 2008, Mullane laid out the chain of events that led to the loss of Space Shuttle Challenger and its crew of seven 73 seconds into its 10th flight on January 28,1986.

The Solid Rocket Boosters that power the Shuttle during the first stage of ascent are far too large to be shipped in one piece, so they’re assembled on-site near the launch pad. A series of complex joints seal the gaps, with insulation protecting the structural steel and flexible double-O-rings from the 5,000 degree heat of the propellant. Those O-rings were never intended to be touched by flame. Because the SRB’s are reusable – they’re recovered by parachute, disassembled and inspected, then reloaded with propellant – it was possible to examine the seals for each of the 24 flights that preceded Challenger’s final mission, and as early as STS-2, flame damage to the O-rings was discovered.

Per Mullane, the correct, by-the-book response to this alarming revelation was “ground the fleet” until a solution could be found and implemented. But there was enormous pressure to keep up the pace of launches, because the Shuttle program had been sold to Congress as a 26-launch-per-year, low cost spaceflight program. In retrospect, this was an impossible goal, but with funding on the line, deviance from the stated safety standard was the only way to try to keep on schedule. The reasoning was that the SRB had survived flame damage to an O-ring seal, and as long as no more extensive damage was observed on subsequent flights, everything was OK. For the next 22 flights, the recovered rocket boosters didn’t show the same level of damage seen on STS-2, so the deviance from the established safety standard became the norm. The engineers and program managers responsible for the safety of shuttle crews were training themselves to believe that because nothing bad had happened yet, nothing would in the future. Then, on the 25th flight, what Mullane calls “predictable surprise” occurred, with fatal consequences.

So what does any of this have to do with racing? Think about it for a moment and I’m sure you can come up with a few examples of normalized deviance you’ve seen firsthand, maybe even in your own program. Shortcuts that were taken for the sake of making the next round or even just getting to the track in the first place. A perfect example is heating a nitrous bottle with a torch. (Let me be totally clear here in saying that there is absolutely no reason to suspect that this played any role whatsoever in the ADRL incident, which apparently occurred as the bottle was being filled.) Applying open flame to a nitrous bottle is strictly forbidden by every drag racing rulebook, and for good reason. But people do it all the time, and the fact that there’s almost always no bad outcome trains them that it’s OK to keep doing it. You see it in their response when you call them on it – “I’ve never had a problem and I’ve been doing it for years…” “I know how to do it without damaging the bottle…” They’ve normalized that deviance from the safety rules in their own minds.

Have you ever gotten under your car when it’s just on a jack, because it was a pain in the ass to go find a jack stand? Overloaded a trailer because you weren’t going that far? Tested a transbrake in your driveway the night before heading out to a race? It turned out OK, and even though that first time you did it you might have felt a little uneasy about it, the next time you worried a little less, because you’ve set up a feedback loop that reinforces the idea that it will always be OK. The hammer usually falls on an empty chamber, but that doesn’t mean you’re not playing Russian Roulette. There may be 10,000 empty chambers instead of just five, but that doesn’t make it suck any less when you find the full one. Worst yet, you can probably think of a lot of situations where the muzzle of the gun is against somebody else’s head, too, and if you have a little predictable surprise, it won’t just affect you personally.

It’s not being overly dramatic to say that the safety regulations are “written in blood.” Sadly, it often takes tragedy to write a new paragraph in that rulebook, but it’s even sadder when we discard that sacrifice because we’re lazy, in a hurry, or just simply get complacent. My belief is that the best memorial for those who have lost their lives in the pursuit of the sport we all love is to stand down for a moment and think about what we can do to head off another tragedy before it happens. This week, take some time to remember Mike Walker by identifying ways you’ve become complacent about safety, potentially dangerous shortcuts you’re taking for the sake of convenience or haste.