Indycar 2011 @ Las Vegas

De Cesaris fan · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 6:00 pm

Yeah. You can criticise the style of racing, the fencing, the Dallara's habit of flying all you like. But the truth is that when you're about to fly or hit something at 200mph, being in that Dallara cockpit is probably one of the best places you can be. I don't think any of the 14 others have even broken any bones. If Dan's car rotates at a slightly different angle then I have no doubt all 15 would be alive, and the media would just be glorifying it as a wild accident.

phil1993 · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 6:04 pm

Yes, Wheldon had signed a deal to replace Danica effectively.

RtN · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 6:14 pm

Well, maybe Michael can give Newgarden his big break.

makeyourself · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 6:33 pm

if there was no catch fence ... dan wheldon would still be here today. sure he would have flown way outside the track but he would still be here. catch fences protect the cars from the spectators...theses type of fences have been around for decades but its 2011. its time for an improvement. think of plexi glass at a hockey game. take that and make it about 9 inches thick....

i said this on tbk in 2003 when kenny crashed. DO IT!

cookie · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 6:37 pm

De Cesaris fan wrote:

Yeah. You can criticise the style of racing, the fencing, the Dallara's habit of flying all you like. But the truth is that when you're about to fly or hit something at 200mph, being in that Dallara cockpit is probably one of the best places you can be. I don't think any of the 14 others have even broken any bones. If Dan's car rotates at a slightly different angle then I have no doubt all 15 would be alive, and the media would just be glorifying it as a wild accident.

Indeed, in one replay angle you could clearly see Wheldon scathed along the fencing with the cockpit side and then hit a pole. I think that pole hit his head first and then took of the roll-bar. The fencing was not the problem, just the pole holding it up. It's these poles that do the damage and catapult cars back on the track when they hit the fence. If they somehow can make the fence smooth all the way round the track, that would solve a lot of problems in these airborne crashes. The new car will hopefully also limit cars going airborne with those fenders behind the rear wheels. I could see these devices being mandatory on all openwheelers in the future if they work properly.

Also the fact that it was the last race with these cars makes it so tragic for me that we saw a fatality. Just 200 laps and they never had to race them again. With the new car this might have just been a big crash with no cars flying through the air and every driver climbing out unhurt. But with every accident you think what would have happened if this or that had gone a bit different.

I was at work during the race and at the end of my shift a colleague asked me if I followed Indycar. I said yes, but asked him not to tell me the results of the race because I taped it and wanted to see it when I got home. He said he had to tell me what he had just read on his mobile phone, I was in shock when he showed me Wheldon's picture and told me he died. Felt like shit for the whole of Monday, only slept 2 hours. Just couldn't stop thinking about the horrible crash and fate of Wheldon. I'm glad that I didn't see it live, sitting in uncertainty about his condition for 2 hours must have been hell.

StanV · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 6:57 pm

westracing01 wrote:

I think I've finally figured out what's been bothering me about this crash the most. The shear, unadulterated, brutal violence of it. We've all seen horrifying crashes, but none of us have ever seen anything like what we saw on Sunday. That's the part I can't get over.

I mentioned it somewhere else, but in my eyes this crash actually ranks with the most violent ones ever, not only from "our" generation. Even in the "dark" ages of the 50s, 60s, 70s I can't recall a lot of accidents with SUCH a big toll...

Belgian media has actually done a better job reporting this than I had expected. Actually explaining how big a name Wheldon is, what he had achieved. They've also done an interview with Bertrand Baguette today, who was there as well for his 2012-negotiations (targeting a full season) and had spent a lot of time on Friday & Saturday chatting to Dan.

Cheeveer · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:13 pm

Robin Miller again. He's on it, spot on.

[spoiler]

Quote:

Adrian Fernandez, who quit open wheel racing in 2004 when the Indy Racing League was all ovals because he felt it was "too dangerous" on the 1.5-mile tracks, was sitting on the pit wall Sunday afternoon while we waited on the inevitable news about Dan Wheldon.

"I have never seen drivers so on edge as they were this morning," said Fernandez, who won oval races in CART and IRL during his 12-year career. "And I mean all of them I talked to were really concerned about the speeds and running three abreast."

Unfortunately, their fears were well founded as Wheldon perished instantly in a brutal, 15-car pileup on Lap 12 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

But as tragic and shocking as it was to lose to the two-time Indy 500 winner, it really didn’t surprise a lot of us who have cringed for the past 15 years watching the madness of pack racing an Indy car at over 210 mph.

The longtime IRL mantra of low horsepower and high downforce on banked tracks built for NASCAR was always a recipe for disaster because it forced the drivers to run wide open every lap or else lose 10 spots or get run over.

In the process, wheels were interlocked and tires rubbed and it was a ticking time bomb.

Kenny Brack was badly battered at Texas in 2003, Ryan Briscoe suffered serious injuries in a nasty 2004 accident at ChicagoLand and Dario Franchitti walked away from a frightening flip at Michigan in 2007.

I wrote a commentary after Brack’s wreck referring to this madness as Death Race 2000 yet, incredibly, the countless crashes on these tracks never resulted in a fatality.

Until Sunday afternoon.

'It’s not racing, it’s insanity," said one veteran after the race was red flagged and eventually canceled following a 5-lap tribute to Wheldon. "I wasn’t going back out there if they put a gun to my head."

Russian Roulette on four wheels has always made for exciting finishes but pack racing where cars are stuck together for long periods of time isn’t pure racing or even skillful.

"It’s nothing more than a big dyno test," said Will Power prior to the season finale.

And, because Vegas had so much more grip than Kentucky, the speeds were 7-8 mph - cresting 224 mph in traffic during practice.

It also allowed the cars to run three abreast in the corners, pure lunacy with open wheels.

Put some inexperienced drivers on an oval that’s easy to run flat out in 34 identical cars and you are asking for disaster. Nobody can get away and it’s a swarm.

CART figured out a way to run superspeedways with big fields in the late 1990s with an aero helper known as the Handford Device. It allowed the cars to slingshot and get separation and there were more than 150 passes for the lead at Michigan one year.

"We were able to make it work and the problem is fixable," said Steve Horne, the longtime car owner who now assists Tony Kanaan. "We just need to tell the engineers and aerodynamicists to come up with something.

"Mark Handford wasn’t a racer, he was a wind tunnel guy but he gave us something that worked very well."

What would really work well is to increase the horsepower to 900 and take away a healthy dose of downforce so drivers would have to brake for the corners on ovals. No more running wide open: ANYWHERE. And that’s still a possibility with the new cars and engines for 2012.

Bringing back Phoenix, Milwaukee and Loudon would be perfect because those are short ovals that require a lot more driver skill than the 1.5-mile cookie cutters.

If you can’t bring back those old Indy-car bastions, the only way to keep running Texas, Kentucky, Fontana and Vegas is to get creative and do away with pack racing.

The pack mentality surfaced Sunday night as Randy Bernard got inundated with hate mail, people blaming him for Wheldon’s death in a gimmick race. The INDYCAR CEO immediately began questioning himself on whether there were too many cars or the series should have avoided places like Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Were 34 cars too many? Possibly but who’s to say there wouldn’t have been a big crash with 24 cars. Vegas, Texas and Fontana should all go away unless something sensible is designed to create separation.

But Bernard certainly shouldn’t beat himself up for trying to inject new storylines and keep ovals on the schedule.

The series had a formula for what happened here Sunday a long time before Bernard was hired. He inherited this madness. So now he needs to have new car boss Tony Cotman, tech chief Will Phillips and some engineers to figure out a way to make things racy while eliminating running in place at 220 mph side-by-side and flirting with calamity in every corner.

[/spoiler]

http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/ ... al-madness

It's not knee jerk reactions. It is common sense and it's long overdue.

EDIT: I mean, already in the early 70's did they reach 230mph at the Indy, and I guess at Ontario and Pocono as well. It is the cornering speed that is the problem for sure.

makeyourself · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:23 pm

if there was no catch fence ... dan wheldon would still be here today. sure he would have flown way outside the track but he would still be here. catch fences protect the cars from the spectators...theses type of fences have been around for decades but its 2011. its time for an improvement. think of plexi glass at a hockey game. take that and make it about 9 inches thick....

i said this on tbk in 2003 when kenny crashed. DO IT!

Stoegi · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:24 pm

Depends on where you exit the oval tbh. Of course if you just land on flat surface you'd probably have a greater chance of surviving than flying into the catchfence. However if you hit some stationary object at 200mph you'd probably be dead.

ChasKrall · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:40 pm

Little E Fan wrote:

I think there are two things being missed here with what happened. It appeared to me that the roll hoop was damaged and weakened from the intial flips and possible hit with the wall before the fence tore it off. It also seems his head hit the wall along with the fence. Raising the walls would not have helped in this kind of incident, if anything, it may have done the same exact thing.

This was one of those freak accidents, that sadly took the life of a great young man. He will be greatly missed. =(

The roll hoop surely wasn't weakened by any initial flip. The car made no significant impact with anything else before it impacted the wall and catchfence nearly simultaneously. The roll hoop took 100% of the force of a blow to a catchfence support post at somewhere between 180-200 mph. It was sheared off. But that doesn't matter because the driver's helmet is in front of the roll hoop. The post surely made contact with the helmet in the nanosecond before it sheared the roll hoop off the car. The markings and damage to the helmet is proof of that. There is no doubt in my mind that Dan was gone before the car hit the ground as a result of that impact.

Until there is a design that puts some sort of safety structure in front of the driver's head, this same type of accident is always going to be a possibility regardless of how strong the roll hoop is. That device is meant to keep the car from collapsing down on top of the driver in the event it's inverted, not to prevent something from impacting the helmet from the front.

F1-FR · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:44 pm

I'm so sad, he was a famous driver, stopped by an ultimate challenge.

I'm sorry for his fans, we miss you Dan

KingOfChins · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:51 pm

I'm sorry, but from pictures taken during the wreck, there are no visible markings on Wheldon's helmet. There is what appears to be a black mark from hitting the fence on Wheldon's helmet, but that is a part of the actual design on the helmet.

[spoiler]

[/spoiler]

Caspar · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 9:13 pm

I just watched the race and the later part once again. I get the shivers when looking into the details such as peoples faces and reactions towards the end. Don't know for what good.

One can hear the drivers wasn't happy with conditions on the track and the bunched up field. They got rid of Kansas and Chicagoland Speedway from last season and those before. Guess it must have been a active choice to improve safety although I can't recollect to why they were excluded.

There's still tracks which allow cars to go warp-speed but still the approch remains the same and is much accepted. At least that is what it appears from the a public pov. The speed concerns were brought up back in the CART, which we know was even faster. Like most of you touched on I think it is a matter of adapting the cars along with racing them on speedways that somehow match safety and entertainment when designing a schedule. No one would ever race Talladega in these cars to exaggerate. Fans don't want boring races then we also like to see certain venues returning year after year as part of tradition.

zippy · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:23 pm

Didn't a similar accident happen in the Indy Lights Sunday? All this talk of slowing the cars down just makes me look at the accidents in the Lights cars... all at sub 200mph speeds, and still ending up in the fence.

electrodevo · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:30 pm

Matt Clendenning wrote:

think of plexi glass at a hockey game. take that and make it about 9 inches thick....

That resolves the "cheese grater" factor but does not resolve the posts, which is where things can get quite deadly with blunt trauma. I would also be worried about strength (plexiglass can shatter on blunt impact) and environmental issues (some transparent plastic fogs up under certain conditions).

Some clever engineering is going to be needed for the posts. Ideally, it would be nice if a post could "break away" and dissipate some energy, without flying into the crowd, or having the fence collapse. That sounds like a huge challenge, maybe impossible.

If spectators don't need to view the track, simply mounting some energy dissipating material to the fence (eg foam) would help some. But there aren't a lot of good transparent methods that I know of that would do the same thing.

ChasKrall · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:32 pm

zippy wrote:

Didn't a similar accident happen in the Indy Lights Sunday? All this talk of slowing the cars down just makes me look at the accidents in the Lights cars... all at sub 200mph speeds, and still ending up in the fence.

There have been numerous accidents involving cars into the catchfence, both Indycars and Indy Lights. It is not a scenario that anyone ever wants, but in the past it's almost always been survivable. The notable exception was Tony Renna at Indy in a test when he flipped into the turn three catch fence and went through it and into the stands.

Speed isn't the issue. Cars will get into the fence at 50 mph too as long as the wheels are exposed. The cars are much safer than they were, even when Renna was killed. Wheldon's crash would have been survivable had his head not impacted the catchfence support post. The force that ripped off that roll hoop was also exerted upon his helmet the instant before, so you can imagine the force. Had he hit with the bottom of the car, like Power did in the same crash, he'd have gotten out and flashed that smile and bragged about "going out with a bang" (which are words he indeed did use before the race).

Thankfully in virtually every instance, Renna's and Mike Conway's 2010 accident at Indy excluded, these accidents have happened in areas where there weren't spectators (although had Renna had his crash during a race there would have been scores of casualties). That is the number one fear of that type of crash in my book. You never want to injure anyone, but at least the drivers know and accept that risk, the spectators don't.

ChasKrall · PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:36 pm

electrodevo wrote:

Matt Clendenning wrote:

think of plexi glass at a hockey game. take that and make it about 9 inches thick....

That resolves the "cheese grater" factor but does not resolve the posts, which is where things can get quite deadly with blunt trauma. I would also be worried about strength (plexiglass can shatter on blunt impact) and environmental issues (some transparent plastic fogs up under certain conditions).

Some clever engineering is going to be needed for the posts. Ideally, it would be nice if a post could "break away" and dissipate some energy, without flying into the crowd, or having the fence collapse. That sounds like a huge challenge, maybe impossible.

If spectators don't need to view the track, simply mounting some energy dissipating material to the fence (eg foam) would help some. But there aren't a lot of good transparent methods that I know of that would do the same thing.

There might be an idea right there, some sort of spring-loaded mounting that would allow the posts to give upon impact. However, it would still be an issue with a direct helmet-to-post impact as we saw on Sunday.

ChasKrall · PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 12:43 am

FWIW, the crash that claimed Tony Renna was in a G-Force chassis not a Dallara. It's not just an inherent design flaw in the Dallara that sends it airborne.

Philthy82 · PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 12:46 am

Seems to me that although the fence, the open wheel design and close quarters racing all contributed to the tragedy, the open cockpit is the one thing I'd like to see changed. There are so many scenarios that can result in major injury or death with an open cockpit - we've seen it with Surtees and Massa most recently. Open cockpit racecars are IMHO now the most safety-weak part of racing today. The thought that there's a good quarter-sphere of complete vulnerability around the driver's head without any protective structure in front of it is just ridiculous.

Reinforced clear canopies would be great to see. Visibility and track lighting reflections are issues, but should be able to be overcome - Le Mans prototype style cars have dealt with large curved windshields under lights for a long time now.

Other than that, even introducing some thin roll hoops running fore-aft around the driver's head would be an improvement - something that introduces any degree of protection from a solid object heading straight for a helmet.

I just don't buy that visibility issues are worth holding back in this area. NASCAR drivers had the same concerns with closed-face helmets and HANS devices, but nobody's looked back.

Chris A · PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 1:03 am

ChasKrall wrote:

FWIW, the crash that claimed Tony Renna was in a G-Force chassis not a Dallara. It's not just an inherent design flaw in the Dallara that sends it airborne.

In that case the G-Force chassis must have been even worse then, because from what I understand Renna just spun and caught a little of the grass before flying across the track and well up into the fence. At least in the Dallara accidents we've seen there's been a little more stimulus for take-off than a simple spin.

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Indycar 2011 @ Las Vegas

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