In the high-speed world of NASCAR, where every millisecond counts and safety is paramount, a groundbreaking innovation is shaking up the status quo. Joel Stitzel, PhD, chair and professor of Biomedical Engineering, is at the forefront of the challenge to enhance driver safety. Partnering with NASCAR, Stitzel and his team have developed a cutting-edge mouthpiece sensor that has been a game-changer since the 2023 racing season. This tiny device, worn by a select group of drivers in every race, is poised to transform the study of head impacts and pave the way for unprecedented safety advancements on the track.
Building on the work in youth football and other sports, Stitzel and his team developed a mouthpiece sensor worn by motorsports athletes from grassroots dirt track racing to NASCAR, including at least 15 drivers in every NASCAR Cup Series race since the 2023 season. The mouthpiece sensors are designed to measure what happens to a driver’s head during a crash, similar to the Incident Data Recorder or “black box” that monitors a car. NASCAR initially considered earpiece sensors 20 years ago but chose mouthpiece sensors because of the coupling between the upper jaw and the skull.
“The more data we can get, the better informed our analyses and decisions become,” said John Patalak, PhD, vice president of safety engineering at NASCAR and graduate of Wake Forest University School of Medicine’s Biomedical Engineering program. “The mouthpiece sensor itself doesn’t make the driver safer at that moment, but it helps us prioritize safety improvements each year.”
Although Stitzel’s team was able to expand their mouthpiece sensor technology from initial research in youth sports like football, soccer and hockey, they needed a new product that did not interfere with speech and was more comfortable, while also providing reliable data. Drivers have to wear the mouthpiece for several hours while communicating on the radio to their teams during a race, a crucial part of on-track success. The solution was two thin layers encapsulating the instrumentation mounted on the outside of the teeth. The design was refined based on feedback from drivers during pilot deployments in 2021 and 2022, leading to the current version. The team collaborates with a group of hardware, firmware and software designers, as well as with Hurst Dental Lab in Winston-Salem, N.C.
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“Most of the time, we’re writing papers and hoping people cite them and trying to get students through graduation. Seeing Kyle Larson, a NASCAR champion, say, ‘This data mattered to me,’ as something we’re doing to help NASCAR make the sport safe, that’s very rewarding to me.” - Joel Stitzel, PhD, chair and professor of Biomedical Engineering |
The process of designing and testing the mouthpiece sensors involved several key milestones to test progress and included a team of collaborators. They aimed to improve the instrumentation's data capacity, reliability and protection. The demanding environment required the system to perform for several hours while collecting data. The team developed hardware, firmware and cloud software to facilitate data collection and analysis. They created a custom client app to manage deployment and upload of data, which runs on an Android tablet, and has had significant improvements over time. Regular testing in the lab and field ensures the devices meet stringent design specifications.
The Starting Line
After success with initial pilot studies measuring data with other modalities, the School of Medicine team began designing custom instrumentation to measure youth sports head impacts in 2016. In 2015, Patalak began attending the school to first earn his master’s, then his doctorate, and studied with Stitzel. The implementation for NASCAR motorsports began in earnest in 2018-2019.
“NASCAR and NASA had done some work with the NASCAR crash database, and one of the academic groups doing research on behalf of NASA was Wake Forest,” Patalak said. “That was one of the first times I realized there is a group an hour up the road from Concord (N.C.) doing high-level simulation work on head injuries.”
More than a dozen researchers and students at the School of Medicine have supported the NASCAR project since its inception, spearheaded by Stitzel and fellow researcher Jill Urban, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering. There is a representative from the school at every NASCAR Cup event to distribute and collect the mouthpieces after each practice and race.
The latest mouthpiece has a battery that can run for six or more hours. During practices, data is continuously recorded to evaluate how the head reacts during laps without impacts and to measure bumps, areas where a car bottoms out and the G-forces under cornering. During a race, recordings are triggered when a threshold of 4Gs is exceeded to capture a large amount of data for analysis. According to Stitzel, the research team is focused not just on concussions and injury-causing events but also on cumulative exposure to low-level impacts that the head experiences, 99.9% of which are not concussive.
Life in the Fast Lane
Participating NASCAR drivers have full access to their mouthpiece data. By the Monday afternoon after a race, NASCAR gets a communication with events from races, and drivers receive a notification via an app summarizing their recorded events. Only drivers and NASCAR have access to the mouthpiece data, health information shared under a mutual agreement. When the data is used for aggregated, published research, it is anonymous and untraceable to a driver.
One recent example of measuring change has been the data analysis, driver feedback and NASCAR intervention to make changes to and improve driver safety at the Watkins Glen racetrack. Last year during at least one and sometimes two of the apexes of what is called the “Bus Stop” at that track, Cup drivers were experiencing high G-forces to both sides of the head in “a third of the time it takes to blink your eye,” said Stitzel.
In the spring, one NASCAR driver, Kyle Larson, who has self-identified publicly as a study participant, used his data to provide context during a passionate discussion of planned changes to the Watkins Glen racetrack on social media. Larson shared that his mouthpiece recorded 145 impact events, an uncommonly high number, through one part of the track, adding, “Something needed to be done. What was there before was not safe for the brain.”
“Most of the time, we’re writing papers and hoping people cite them and trying to get students through graduation. Seeing Kyle say, ‘Oh, this data mattered to me,’ as something we’re doing to help NASCAR make the sport safe, that’s very rewarding to me. That’s the whole reason we’re doing this. It created some excitement throughout the lab,” said Stitzel.
After the resulting changes were made to the track and during a June 26, 2024, test with NASCAR drivers Tyler Reddick, Daniel Suárez and Austin Cindric at Watkins Glen, Patalak said there were fewer events, and those recorded were of decreased severity. Reddick also expressed confidence in the improvements while “the nature of the Bus Stop remains intact. I appreciate them putting our safety first. It’s great they’re collecting this data. The more data they have, the more they can identify trends.”
Race Results
Additionally, after mouthpiece data showed drivers were experiencing multiple impacts from successive front and rear collisions, NASCAR developed new rear impact head surround foam that could reduce head impact forces by up to 50%. “It made a really big difference in reducing head accelerations in those types of impacts,” Patalak said. “We had mouthpiece sensor drivers reach out and say, ‘Hey, didn’t feel good.’ They never went to the infield care center. So, we’re seeing sometimes the driver’s experience doesn’t match the eyeball test of a car with just a tire mark. So then we can look at the data and say, ‘This is unusual.’
“Then we can look at human body computer modeling data and design a drop test to improve the head foam because we know exactly how fast the driver’s head impacted the foam. That would have taken us way longer to understand without the mouthpiece sensor data.”
Using the device is voluntary, and up to 16 drivers currently wear the mouthpiece in races. Though a heavier lift logistically, Patalak said NASCAR could handle equipping the entire field weekly, and it is his goal to have the mouthpiece participation rate at 100%. “Having the data really helps us decide where we can get the most safety improvements the fastest,” he said. “It gives a glimpse into exactly what happens in a crash, and that makes it actionable. You can go to all the stakeholders and say, ‘This is what we’re pursuing, and this is the data behind it.’ It puts the wheels in motion quickly.”
Fueling Change
The future of head impact research in motorsports looks promising with the continued use of mouthpiece sensors. Stitzel and his team aim to expand research to grassroots dirt track racing, at one time supported by Toyota Racing Development and NASCAR. Detailed data on head impacts will help improve safety systems and vehicle designs. Next steps include making the instrumentation smaller and deploying it to more drivers at a variety of racing levels. The team also plans to expand research in other sports like soccer, football, hockey and mixed martial arts.
Collaboration with NASCAR and other partners has significantly influenced the research direction and highlighted the importance of accurate and honest data reporting. The experience to date has emphasized the value of being responsive to stakeholder engagement and feedback, resulting in the development of more comfortable instrumentation, usable technology and safer driver conditions to keep sports performing stronger for the future.
“We focus on delivering the best work possible and hope that success will follow,” said Stitzel. “Innovative safety technologies often stem from processing a large amount of detailed data that can seem overwhelming. The process can be challenging, but it is essential to make informed decisions and improve safety.”
Special thanks to the team’s research, hardware and software development contributors:
Wake Forest University School of Medicine team:
- Sophie Zoch
- Lindsay Bonsall
- Zoie Mink
- Stewart Pritchard
- Logan Miller
- Ryan Barnard
- Tim Orr
Contributors:
- Mike Hurst, Hurst Dental Lab
- Brian Hurst, Hurst Dental Lab
- Dennis Whitley, Innovative Design Partners
- Tony Kobet, Innovative Design Partners
- Milan Raj, RAJCTG
- Aaron Jones, Salem Technologies
- Chris Tribble, Salem Technologies
*Original story written by Nate Ryan for NASCAR.com