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Difficult to come up with a solution without extending the wall a long way around the track. At least there's protection these days.

I hope they don’t ask the FIA for advice. We could end up with a chicane at T4

They could make the wall slowly rise in a range of 200 meters, it would end head-on crashes and wouln't launch the car into the crowd either.

Let's be real here. This wall could be way better, that is a fact. Closer to T4, and pit entry to be in the middle of back stretch, with a mandatory safe intermediate speed for turns 3 and 4 before the actual pit limiter.

They can make it better. No way that a fucking sudden stop 300 yards into the main straight is the safest solution here.

This is the only spot you can kill someone easily on a regular (not freak) crash around this track. Fucking change it to somewhere you could crash big time but not die on impact.

Any design that extends the wall risks making the Oliver Askew type spear-into-the-T4-inner-wall type crashes worse, IMHO.

Probably the best thing to do would be to improve the impact absorption and/or the "catch and pivot" aspect of that barrier IMHO. New tracks have it lucky in this regard in that they can design with more safety in mind from the get go. Indy was designed in 1909 and didn't even have a wall separating pits from the track until 1957.

In Indy's defense, having a pit wall in 1957 was considered revolutionary, given pretty much no other track in the world had one.

Most likely a reaction to the incident at Le Mans '55.

Instead launches the car into the pits.

so yet no video showing japanese broadcast of another sato win, this time with curasheeee?

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Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

That very much is true; many articles describe the new pit as "state of the art" at the time. There's a nice article I've found on pit improvements at Indy over time here. Even in the 1980s the pit had some serious safety problems (no protection for the sign board men that were at the pit wall "grass strip" at the time).

We've been lucky that every car that has hit the end of the wall has lost control off turn 4 and scrubbed off speed before reaching the pit wall. I dread to think what would happen if somebody went into it at full speed. Hopefully it will never happen, but one poorly timed block or car failure...

Murphy's law: it will happen eventually. Especially given the now normal defending line that everyone takes there, at every restart, and at every lap in the final stint, increasing the probability significantly compared to previous decades. Someone will die on that very spot, guaranteed.

I'd say, the most sensible thing, would be to push the start of the pitwall back a few meters.

According to Google Earth, the attenuator is about 6 meters long. I'd say, make it 15 and get rid of 9-10 meters of concrete.

I don't care if it takes 2 hours to repair, in case of a crash. Just make sure that the energy is properly dissipated in the event of a high speed crash.

There has to be a solution similar to SAFER that can be used in a narrow site like that one, too?

When was the last time this happened in the race? 90s or 80s? It's extremely rare occurrence when someone hits it. Drivers and teams are not making any noise about it, so maybe they don't see it dangerous?


Restarts looks wild from the angle from T1 outside, facing down the front straight. Look any onboard and you see those drivers actually behave very rationally.

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"Indy doesn't give you a second chance. You have to earn it."

Sure, but as with most serious accidents in motorsport these days, there is one freaky factor that can happen, and lead to horrible consequences.

That nosecone could've landed 1 meter away from Justin Wilson. It didn't. Probably won't happen again with or without the Aeroscreen.
That suspension piece could've bounced differently, but it didn't and Massa almost got killed. Probably won't happen again with or without the Halo.

Point is: it may have never happened before, highly likely that it won't ever happen, yet everything can add up to the point that it does. Once. And they weren't ready. And that car could end up split in half, driver included.

I am more afraid of the scoring pilon than the pit wall, and I believe whatever they had in front of the pit wall did it's job for so many years, so they are clearly ahead of us on that. However I believe extending the wall through turn 4, could save someone. I know Helio's clip below is just one person going mental on a restart, but it's one of those 'what if' moments.

The car crashed into the protective area, the guy got out and went home. Seems like it did its job.

I'll admit, I was expecting the dumb debate of how IndyCar should have red-flagged the race when it's really a debate on how to make the track safer to reduce the chances of what happened to Pigot from happening again.

seriously, why is the race finishing under caution a big deal when everyone knew that there's no chance of the race restarting again...even if they clear the wreck in time, the attenuator was damaged severely enough to warrant at least an hour of repair time...probably two. By that time, the TV window would close and/or it's sundown, so everyone would miss a potential meme finish that could kill someone on CNBC. And, let's be honest, that's the last thing anyone would want (especially if your name is Roger Penske).

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Ducks Angels Sounders Spurs

Idk how to word this without sounding kinda insensitive but here goes......a one in a million chance of being injured/killed is part of racing! Everyone knows this going in to it. Yes, we should make advances but not based off of an insane, all circumstances coming together, horrifying crash. Jeez, I can only imagine this thread after Tony Renna's crash. OMG the car went higher than the fence!! Lets put a ceiling around the race track, level with the top of the fence, in case this happens one single more time over the next NINETY FOUR YEARS this place is open. Screw all these track renovations, ya know whats cheaper? Puting a speed limiter on the cars. We'll get closer racing, since they'll all be maxing out at the same speed and the action will be safer for the drivers too. And since the speeds are lower, that means less wear on parts/engine, which also means parts last longer and it's cheaper to run a team. Sooooo if they did that, more teams would join and we'd be back to bumping at Indy which everyone wants too. Damn, I think I just found a fix all for Indycar's problems just now. I've taken all the complaints and found one simple solution.......everyone's with me on this idea right?! rofl

NASCAR's "spoiled" everybody I guess. Personally, although I saw some "this yellow flag finish sucks", I didn't see people making a *huge* deal of the lack of a red flag in the social media circles I am in. There seemed to be drama in other circles though.

In the 1990s, yellow flag finishes sometimes happened, even in NASCAR. At that time, it had been that way ever since the pace car was used to bunch up the field during cautions (since 1979 for the Indy 500). No big deal from my perspective. Heck, before 1979, the Indy 500 used a "Electro-PACER Light" system in the 1970s which tried (not very well from what I understand) to actually keep the gap between cars during caution periods, and not bunch them up behind the pace car. Imagine certain corners of social media's reaction to that sort of system today.

Personally, I'm much less of a fan of the NASCAR gimmicks. In Reddit I did see someone point out the problems of the NASCAR GWC system showed its safety downside in the 2020 Daytona 522.5, which had two overtime finishes, which finished with a nasty shunt at the end.