Unreal photos of Dan Wheldons crash

[mondeo]

Open wheel cars are 10 times more dangerous then a stock car. You don't see cars lift of the ground like that in NASCAR very much at all. NASCAR also has brought there speeds down and have done a great job with safety. There will always be danger and they can still makes things safer but since DE died in what 2003? Nothing has happened in NASCAR at all.

There hasn't been a death in F1 since Senna, despite achieving the same speeds. The fact that NASCARs don't lift off has as much to do with the fact that they weigh 3400lbs, not 1500lbs, and have brick like aerodynamics instead of a flat plate; ask Mark Webber if a closed wheel car can achieve lift off.

IRL will continue to race on ovals. The mix of ovals and road courses is what makes the series unique, and if you cut out everything other than Indianapolis, you'll start to see issues like F1 had at Indy in 2005. Cutting power isn't the answer, because that just ends up with stuff like bump drafting. So you either need to go to lower banking or reduced grip, so the cars need to lift, which breaks up the pack and emphaszes driver skill and the actual racing. The other thing that will help, and is already on the 2012 chassis, are features that prevent contact between tires. The thing that most often launches open wheel cars is tire on tire contact, and simply protecting the tires in front and back can do a lot to prevent take off.

 

[mondeo]

Condolences to the Weldon Family.

That race should have never happened. The CEO of the IRL wanted a show. It was the last race for that engine / chassis. It was like they took every last one that would pass tech inspection and put a body in it. Indy is 2.5 miles with much slower corners and they limit the field to 33. LVMS is 1.5 miles, with high bank turns that they just floor all the way around and they started 34. Lot of drivers with (R's) after their name.
Dan won INDY this year but didn't sponsorship for the whole season ( He did a lot of high level Kart racing.), so the CEO came up with this race from the last row for $5 mil..
There is also their head of safety, Brian Barnhart, that didn't say it wasn't a good idea.

He was one of those drivers that would always talk to people. Good Guy Gone.

The $5 million purse was just part of making the race a spectacle, essentially part of an attempt to simply save the series from bad ratings. There have been a lot of rookies in IRL for a while, just because it's become a feeder league as much as anything else. And saying he just did a lot of kart racing ignores the amount of testing he had done on the 2012 chassis (which may have saved his life, which is one of the tragedies about the entire thing.) But no lift racing with identical cars isn't racing and is dangerous.

RIP Dan

This death has hit me harder than any other in my over 15 years of being a racing fan. So many things were wrong with this race and weekend in Las Vegas.

Ovals are an outdated way of racing. The USA is the only country in the world where high speed ovals are used for professional racing.

We've always been the outlier in regards to the use of ovals. It has more to do with racing starting with horse tracks here, where it started on public roads in Europe.

The tub did it's job. It was completely intact. It was the contact of the cockpit to the catch fence. A canopy may have saved his life.

I have been in the pits for these cars at few races. These cars are amazing and it is hard to believe anyone can fit into the cockpits.

Canopies for these cars (and even the closed cockpits for prototypes) are more about protection from debris than impact protection. One would have saved Massa from his season ending (and potentially much worse) injury a couple years ago, but I'm not sure even a fully enclosed roll structure a la NASCAR or rally cars would save a driver from an impact with an obstruction above the actual crush structure. Roll cages/hoops are designed to prevent the car from crushing itself, not to absorb 200mph collisions.

 

[drjeff]

We've always been the outlier in regards to the use of ovals. It has more to do with racing starting with horse tracks here, where it started on public roads in Europe.

Plus, you simply can't argue the fact that from a fan viewing perspective, the modern oval with high banks allows just about anyone sitting in the grandstands to view the full track, rather than just a portion and relying on where the TV feed is focusing on at that moment for the rest of it as is the case with the vast majority of road courses. And happy fans tend to be repeat customers, and that's good for the sport

Canopies for these cars (and even the closed cockpits for prototypes) are more about protection from debris than impact protection. One would have saved Massa from his season ending (and potentially much worse) injury a couple years ago, but I'm not sure even a fully enclosed roll structure a la NASCAR or rally cars would save a driver from an impact with an obstruction above the actual crush structure. Roll cages/hoops are designed to prevent the car from crushing itself, not to absorb 200mph collisions.

I wonder if the next major leap in track safety will come from a new type of fencing, one that somehow doesn't rely on as many vertical, "rigid" metal poles to hold the fencing inplace, but argueably can cause more harm if a car gets airborn, above the safer barrier and into the fencing. If something that is akin to how major league baseball hangs their nettting behind home plate, where it's relys on far less vertical supports, but yet still as the strength to keep a 200+ mph car inside the track, that might help in a sense to keep the car sliding along the fence and not potentially start them tumbling if they "catch" on a vertical support. The forces and physics behind this are just so massive that at this time there likely isn't a way to do something like this

 

[JimG.]

As others have said, automobile racing is inherently dangerous; injuries and deaths are unavoidable.

The catch fencing is clearly what wound up killing Wheldon; but the fences are there to protect spectators. There have been incidents where cars and debris wound up in the crowds killing fans. I believe any driver would rather face risk to his own life than risk the fans' lives.

Someone mentioned the death of Ayrton Senna in Italy years ago; there was a lawsuit that dragged on for years brought against the Williams team he drove for. But that suit was based on evidence that team engineers had modified steering components to make them lighter but that ultimately lead to failure. This is a whole different story and I doubt there will be any lawsuits.

There will be modifications to the catch fencing, but the risk of death and injury will never be eliminated. And I think this is what bothers us all so much about Wheldon's death...deep inside, I know it isn't the last racing death I will see.