Anyone else see this crash? Just wow. RIP, prayers to his family. Pretty sure he was a new father also as he was only 33.
The camera inside his car was live as the accident started to happen in front of him and the picture cuts away. Awful!! http://sports.yahoo.com/nascar/blog...-horrible-IndyCar-crash-at-?urn=nascar-wp4538
Wickedly bad thing. A whole lot of cars exploded on that one. It's a wonder there aren't more deaths in the racing game no matter how much they improve safety.
There's a picture of his car with the roll bar behind his head completely sheered off. I've been following indy car racing for 20 years and never once have I seen that.
saw the replays of it after we got back from fishing. nasty nasty crash, some people forget just how light those things are and how easy it is for them to get airborne. prayers go out to his friends and family. missed the five lap tribute the drivers did for him don
Bad thing was the drivers have been complaining all week about 225 mph on a flat track. That is way to fast with no banking. My stepdad use to work on indy cars back in the 70's and I was amazed how fast those cars were in person. Havent been to Indy since he quit working on them.
Prays go out to his family, Anyone think IRL will take some heat for the way they had the race formatted?
was watching the race and saw the crash. i knew it was a bad one but after they covered his car on the track and none of the other cars i knew something really bad had happened.
I don't think anyone will take the heat, even though many racers were uncomfortable, but you never know and I certainly don't know all the details. That said, these days, one of the biggest compliments to the racing industry is the aspect of safety. Wheldon was the first person in 5 years that has passed away in the IRL circuit. You will likely to see many changes result of this. The IRL will have their team study this crash in the off season. Since the season is over you obviously won't see any changes this year, however if it were early in the season, you would see them immediately reduce the number of cars on the track (track size depending, and probably set some sort of speed vs. banking ratio). Most of the time they put in a few changes of what they believe led to the event and then make rule changes after they have studied it.
First of all Vegas (where the crash happened) is a banked track.... They go just as fast at Indy which is a flat track... The IRL series has the best drivers in the world. These drivers are better than the majority of Nascar drivers. Why do you ask? For one simple reason... FENDERS! Now granted people like Jeff Gordan and Tony Stewart and a few others grew up in open wheel racing. However if you take the fenders off in Nascar, this same thing would happen every week. When two tires hit each other they do not bounce off of eachoter... Someone is going in the air plain and simple. I would like to see/read in interview of a driver complaining about the speed because I never heard of anything like that. They knew there was going to be a bigger field of cars on the mile and a half track however all of them strapped in their cars and went out for a race. Dan Wheldon was actually the driver that was testing the new 2012 car for IRL. I do not believe new rules will be put into place for the series. The only thing I could see happening is maybe making the outside walls higher so the cars do not go into the catch fences. This is a high risk sport. Only one other driver has been killed in a RACE in the past 12 years. Others have been killed in practice runs but not during an actual race. The last driver to die was Greg Moore back in 1999 at California. Are the speeds crazy fast? Yes. But it is what the drivers love to do. It is what the fans love to see. Dan Wheldon was a great man and great driver and his crash was very sad... But they knew going into this race it could happen. Nobody is to blame. That is racing plain and simple... And if they do anything to these cars to make them "safer" as in try and put a fender on it, it will take all the skill and excitement out of the IRL Series... Just my .02
