Imagine you're driving along on a crowded freeway when your car sustains a flat tire.

You dutifully and carefully pull to the shoulder of the road, get out, look at the damage, and if you're like most, will attempt to replace the flat yourself.

But what if the shoulder that your car rests upon was so narrow that your gluteus maximus sticks out significantly into the traffic lane as cars, trucks, busses and motorcycles whiz by you at 55 mph or faster? There's no other room to work with, so you accept the risk in order to service your car. You try to be careful, but also remain on guard, knowing you could become someone's hood ornament in a split-second.

That's the scenario that occurs at many Winston Cup tracks, where the pit box or pit road -- or both -- are so narrow that when crew members hop over the pit wall to service their team's car, they're taking their lives into their own hands, both literally and figuratively.

How many times have fans, reporters and even fellow team members collectively held their breath when yet another close call happens on pit road? Or worse yet, when there truly is a confrontation between man and machine, a battle that man will never, ever win, no matter what.

Sunday's pit road accident at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the 10th running of the Brickyard 400 once again underscores the need for NASCAR to make even more wide-reaching changes in its safety manual. When Dale Jarrett locked up his rear brakes and lost control entering the pits, spinning around and hitting team member John Bryan, while a loose tire that was ready to be placed on Jarrett's car during the pit stop struck a Muncie, Ind., newspaper photographer, it illustrated how much work still needs to be done.

When you have a track like IMS, the existing pit road boxes are much narrower, geared more for the narrower Indy cars that race there in the Indianapolis 500 rather than Winston Cup stock cars. Pit road boxes at Indy are just more than 14-feet wide, while pit road boxes at most regular Winston Cup venues are anywhere from 16- to 18-feet wide, give or take a few inches.

What's more, IMS has a narrow two-lane pit road that makes it virtually impossible to try and squeeze three cars across. If you are foolish enough -- or get caught in a situation where you're forced into such tight quarters -- you may wind up running into another car or into one or more crew members.

	Dale Jarrett's pit road crash at the Brickyard illustrates how pit crews are at risk.

What makes Sunday's incident at IMS even more unfortunate is this type of thing has happened to Jarrett's crew before. For it was less than two years ago, in November 2001, that Bryan and several other teammates were involved in yet another pit road mishap at Homestead-Miami (Fla.) Speedway. While the three members of Jarrett's crew suffered a variety of injuries after being struck by Ward Burton's car (which had been struck by Casey Atwood's car), at least some good came out of it when NASCAR mandated that all over-the-wall crew members must wear helmets for safety reasons.

After Sunday, it wouldn't be surprising if NASCAR mandates heavy-duty flak jackets to decrease some of the risk that the crew members are faced with each race. But there's still more that sanctioning-body officials can do.

I wrote a column nearly two years ago calling for pit roads to be made wider at almost all tracks on the current Winston Cup circuit. I felt that pit boxes should be a minimum of 20-feet wide -- even wider would be better -- and about 35 to 40-feet long.

I also proposed that if it meant such short, tight tracks like Bristol (Tenn.) or Martinsville (Va.) had to cut into their infield to widen pit road, so be it.

Another suggestion I proposed, which I was promptly taken to task for by several readers -- with some feeling it was nothing short of a ludicrous idea that wouldn't fly -- was to have pit boxes on both sides of pit road, namely to the right and left as drivers come in off the racetrack. My thinking was simple: If pit road is appreciably widened and cars and crew members have more room to work with, does it really make a difference if service to the car is coming from either the right or left side?

It's not any different for a crew to hop over one side of a wall as opposed to another. Look at CART, where teams that race at certain tracks -- Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis., immediately comes to mind -- have to service the car from the left, rather than the right because pit road is on the right-hand side of the track near the start-finish line.

Jarrett was understandably quite remorseful after Sunday's accident. He called it one of the biggest mistakes of his driving career, and was thoroughly broken up over what happened. That he even managed to get back on the racetrack afterward was surprising, given his frame of mind.

After Bryan and his other crew members were hurt at Homestead-Miami, Jarrett was one of the most vocal voices when it came to lobbying NASCAR officials to make helmets for crew members a mandatory accruement to their other safety equipment and procedures. Thankfully, helmets are now just as crucial to crew safety as fire extinguishers.

But while helmets were indeed a significant step forward, it now seems clear that much more needs to be done to protect over-the-wall guys.

When it came to dramatically improving safety issues following Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash at Daytona in February 2001, NASCAR did an amazing amount of work in a relatively short period of time to greatly enhance conditions for drivers and fans alike. But Sunday's mishap proved there's still a lot more left to be done for the lowest guys on the safety food chain, the pit road crew members.

So I'll say it again: NASCAR should mandate uniform widths and lengths for pit boxes at all tracks that hold Winston Cup, Busch Series and Craftsman Truck races. I'd like to see those pit boxes be at least 20-feet wide -- which by comparison measure, is actually still narrower than the length of a basketball free-throw lane, from sideline to free-throw line.

If pit road at some tracks has to be torn up or moved back to allow for further footage to expand pit boxes, well, that should merely be an additional price of doing business if a track owner wants to keep his or her Winston Cup event. And while I'm probably going to be chastised and vilified again for this proposal, I still think that a wider pit road with pit boxes on both sides -- particularly at tracks that can accommodate such width and length (places like California and Daytona come to mind) -- is an idea that is worth exploring.

Fortunately, Bryan and the photographer suffered only minor injuries Sunday. If I was in Bryan's shoes, I admittedly might have some hesitation about coming back, given the two significant scares he's already received. At the very least, he should probably put in for a hazardous-duty pay raise.

NASCAR needs to address pit road safety much further. Mandating helmets was a big step, but there's still more hurdles to vault, regardless of the cost. After all, isn't spending maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars to reconfigure and expand pit road a monetary drop in the bucket if it helps sustain the most priceless commodity known to man, that of life and limb?

Jerry Bonkowski covers NASCAR for ESPN.com. He can be reached at Motorsportwriter@Yahoo.com.