Both sports have safety precautions in place — remarkable feats of ingenuity and engineering, reducing, if not eliminating, some of the hazards inherent in steering a machine at great speed among other machines equally speedy, if not more so. But among those precautions, you would look far and wide for a common airbag. And would find one neither at NASCAR nor Formula 1.

The quick and easy answer is, they don’t need them. As Wonderful Engineering explains, an airbag — required in U.S. automobiles as of September 1, 1998, says Autojumble — isn’t necessary, because most of its functions are performed by other pieces of equipment. Perhaps first and foremost is the HANS — the Head and Neck Support, worn on the shoulders and supporting the helmet, thereby stabilizing the driver’s head and keeping it from smacking into something like the steering wheel. The driver’s seating area is a “survival shell,” a rigid enclosure within the machine to protect the driver in case of calamity.

Similarly, NASCAR vehicles have roll cages built into the car’s structure. How Stuff Works tells us that the drivers also utilize high-tech helmets and HANS gear. It’s also argued that an airbag has the potential to actually slow down and hamper a driver’s reaction time when fractions of a second count. Like Formula 1, NASCAR drives use more than a simple three-point seat belt; they have five-point restraint systems to stabilize the driver in the unfortunate event of an impact.