The first thing Jimmy Spencer thought about after hitting the wall in a Truck Series race at Richmond (Va.) International Speedway last week was how mad he was.

That reaction may not seem surprising, but it was significant. Instead of feeling anger, Spencer could have been feeling pain.

“I wasn’t even thinking about whether my leg was hurt or my ribs were hurt or whatever, I was wondering what happened,” Spencer said. “I was saying, ‘Who did it to me?’ I was thinking about the wreck instead of whether I was hurt.”

A day after that crash, Spencer joked about being NASCAR’s first official “soft-wall tester.” His truck had hit the steel-and-foam energy-reducing barrier under race conditions after the SAFER barrier had been installed at the Richmond track.

The barrier now stands in front of a total of 2,394 feet of concrete wall in the turns at the three-quarter-mile Richmond track.

The system, which features 3/16-inch steel tubes backed by 22-inch-thick blocks of foam constructed in sections that can be added or removed individually after a crash, also will be in place this weekend at New Hampshire International Speedway.

Richmond and New Hampshire join Indianapolis Motor Speedway as the tracks with fully installed SAFER barrier systems. Homestead-Miami Speedway will have them when its reconfigured track opens later this year. Talladega Superspeedway has some of the barriers on inside walls coming off its turns, too.

Finally, some say.

“We’ve worked on the cars for 50 years to make them safer, but the same concrete wall is still up there,” Ryan Newman said earlier this year after a crash in practice at Watkins Glen in New York. “I know it has got to be better. … It’s a move in the right direction and it’s about time.”

Adam Lounder works on the SAFER barriers at Richmond International Raceway.

Gary Nelson, NASCAR managing director for competition, understands the drivers’ impatience.

“One of the drivers said one day we’ll look back and say, ‘Do you remember when we had concrete walls?’ ” Nelson said. “I think someday we will look back and say that.

“But it is a process of invention that gets any technology to where it is today, and that never stops. How did we get from the typewriter to the computer? It took a series of inventions. It’s a lot simpler when you think of a wall put up to absorb energy, but a lot harder when you think of taking a typewriter and making it into a computer.”

Nelson said NASCAR had participated in 24 full-scale crash tests and thousands of computer simulations at the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska, where the SAFER barrier was developed.

“It looks simple and looks great but there was a long road to get here,” he said. “And I still have to remind people that this is still part of the test. Richmond and Loudon are steps in the process.

“It’s not, ‘It’s done, put it up.'”

There were several impacts into the SAFER barrier at Richmond, including the one Spencer walked away from. That’s critical to the next phase of testing and development for the energy-absorbing barriers, Nelson said

“We can’t duplicate race conditions,” he said. “In field testing all we could ever do is drive the car into the wall, so we would do a concrete wall test and then put up a SAFER wall and do that test. But these guys are hitting backward and sideways and corners — all the different angles. The results we’re seeing are adding to our database.”

It is from that base, built since “black box” data recorders were installed in NASCAR racing vehicles, that experts will look for impacts into concrete walls that have similar characteristics — speed, angle of entry and so on — as hits on the SAFER barriers. That’s where the actual effect of the new barrier might be accurately assessed.

Until such data is available, unscientific reactions like those from Spencer at Richmond are all NASCAR has to go on.

“I never even got dazed,” Spencer said. “It was a hard hit, too. … It never even knocked the wind out of me. There’s no question that the (SAFER) walls are working.”