INDIANAPOLIS -- Geoffrey Bodine said that at 180 miles an hour, there is no such thing as a "soft wall." And that includes the new barriers at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

"I wish I could tell you I could feel a difference, but it felt pretty darn hard," Bodine said Sunday after a crash on lap 51 of the Brickyard 400.

"We'll look at the car and see if we can tell any difference there with the crash. I think I almost missed the soft part of the wall, so maybe it didn't even come into play."

Bodine was one of four Winston Cup drivers to make contact with the Steel And Foam Energy Reduction (SAFER) walls that were installed in the turns of the 2½-mile speedway prior to the Indianapolis 500. None of the four felt a noticeable difference in the new barrier but applauded the walls as a step in the right direction.

"I'm able to walk away from a 200 mile an hour hit," Kurt Busch said after hitting the barrier in Turn 3. "It seems that it did its job."

Mike Wallace, who was the first stock car driver to hit the new wall when he crashed in Turn 2 on lap 12, agreed.

"I wasn't sure if I hit the barrier or the concrete wall," he said. "I guess I'm glad I hit that because it hit a ton just then, so I'm glad it was there."

In May, seven of the 1,550-pound, open-wheel cars made contact with the new walls, which are comprised of vertically stacked rectangular steel tubes and bundles of extruded, closed cell polystyrene. After walking away from the collisions, Indy Racing League were singing the praises of the new walls.

IMS officials were pleased with the performance of the wall again Sunday, even if several of the drivers didn't seem to notice.

"As we said in May, we'll learn from every impact into the SAFER Barrier, and I'm sure we'll learn some things from today's crashes," IMS director of engineering and construction Kevin Forbes said. "The barrier today behaved how we predicted."

Forbes confirmed there was one small tear in a tube from one of the impacts, but said it didn't affect the integrity of the wall.

Casey Atwood, who crashed between Turns 1 and 2 on lap 98, agreed with Bodine that there seemed to be little difference between the new barrier and the original cement walls.

"It still hurt," Atwood said. "I'm not hurt anywhere, so maybe it helped. Hopefully they'll find out some stuff on our (crash data) recorders and see if the wall helped any. Maybe we can learn something that will help in the future."

The SAFER Barrier has been under development by the IRL and the University of Nebraska's Midwest Roadside Safety Facility since 1998. NASCAR joined the project in 2000. In June, it approved its use for the 3,500-pound stock cars at Indianapolis.

New Hampshire International Speedway owner Bob Bahre wanted to install the walls at his facility this summer, but NASCAR officials felt the barrier needed more testing before it could be used on a banked track.