While the search for answers and solutions goes on, there was some good news Monday when Winston Cup driver Jerry Nadeau’s condition was upgraded from critical to serious but stable at Virginia Commonwealth University Hospital in Richmond.

As the recovery process begins for the 32-year-old driver, questions about the crash and its consequences are also beginning to be addressed.

Nadeau was wearing the HANS head-and-neck restraint when his MB2/MBV Motorsports car spun from the low side of Turn 1 to the outside wall near Turn 2, turning 180 degrees so that the driver’s side hit the wall first.

NASCAR impounded the wrecked Pontiac. It was kept on the track property but outside the track itself over the weekend, then brought to the research and development center in Concord, N.C., where NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter said further examination of it began Monday.

Jason Keller drove the team’s backup car in last Saturday night’s race. While the team has announced no decision about a long-term fill-in for Nadeau, general manager Jay Frye said it would enter the car in all Winston Cup events.

Meanwhile, this week at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Midwest Roadside Safety Facility, Dr. Dean Sicking has scheduled a test of the SAFER energy-absorbing barrier system that everyone involved hopes might someday make a critical difference in crashes like the one Nadeau had last Friday.

Snow and high winds have delayed testing of a version of the SAFER barrier Sicking and his team have designed for tracks with short-radius turns like Richmond and New Hampshire. Hunter said those two NASCAR tracks would likely be the first fitted with the adapted barrier.

A SAFER barrier system is already in place in the turns at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but because the 2.5-mile track has a longer radius in each of its turns that version of the “soft wall” won’t work at a place like Richmond.

“What we do with large-radius tracks is we don’t put up a curved wall,” Sicking said. “We put up a series of straight segments and each segment has a bend in the joint of about 11/2 degrees.”

The barrier segments at Indy are about 20 feet long, Sicking said. Segments for a track like Richmond, however, would be only about 6 feet long. That means that a car hitting the barrier might encounter more than one of the 11/2-degree bends as it made impact, and Sicking’s team believes that could be a problem. The shorter segments also complicate the way segments slide together to be affixed to the wall and to be removed so damaged segments could be replaced.

The SAFER system at Indy also has cartridges of foam behind the barrier itself that are different when stock cars race and when Indy cars are on the track. While working on the issues presented by turn radii, Sicking and his team are also refining the barrier so that the same cartridges could be used for different types of cars. That would allow the SAFER barrier to be put up at tracks where, for instance, the NASCAR Truck series and the Indy Racing League are on the track for practices on the same day.

Hunter said Monday that until after the results of this week’s test were studied, there was no way to know if a SAFER barrier could be in play by July when the Winston Cup circuit goes to New Hampshire or by September’s return to Richmond.

Sicking said it was clear to him how badly NASCAR wanted to see the walls go up.

“Every indication we get out of NASCAR is they would like this to happen much quicker than we’ve been able to pull this off,” he said. “The only thing we’re getting out of NASCAR is pressure to go faster.”

Sicking said Monday he hadn’t yet seen replays of Nadeau’s crash, but based on what he had been told it was the type of incident where the SAFER barrier might be beneficial.

“In a driver’s-side crash, there is really very little crush distance available in the car,” he said. “This in one of the impacts where we think the barrier would have had some opportunity to help. … Whether it would have made a difference or not, though, is useless speculation.”