Horrendous Indy car crash in Vegas -- Update: RIP Dan Wheldon

[murphyc]

Did he say anything that was incorrect?

In particular, was this incorrect?

"Their average was 225? I've never been 225 mph in my life - and that's their average around an oval. They are brave men and women that drive those things," Johnson said. "There's very little crumple zone around the driver, it's an open cockpit and then you add open wheels - it's just creating situations to get the car off the ground at a high rate of speed. And you can't control the car when it's off the ground."

I'm sorry, but 225 mph is way too fast for cars like that. Johnson is right.

Johnson was not right. He wasn't even close.
That said, I'm hoping the new car is better on the 1.5-mile ovals. Some of the worst IndyCar crashes I can recall happened at Atlanta, Texas (more than once), Charlotte, Chicagoland and now Las Vegas. All 1.5-mile ovals.
I guess I was in the minority since I hate the close racing at those types of tracks. Just like how I hated plate "racing" back when I watched NASCAR. Everyone on top of each other, just waiting for The Big One to hit? No thanks. Plates weren't the answer after Allison's 'Dega wreck in 1987. Cars were slowed, but were things safer with the slower speeds? No. If you doubt it, look for replays of the 1993 DieHard 500.
NASCAR got lucky at Talladega in the fall of 2000 when there were no wrecks, despite drivers 3- and 4-wide all day. Earnhardt's late charge seemed to push safety concerns about the aero package to the back burner. Running that aero package at the Daytona 500 in 2001 was asking for disaster, just like what Bernard and Brainfart tried Sunday at Las Vegas. NASCAR got a well-earned black eye and IndyCar deserves the same.
I seem to recall Dario left IndyCar after 2007 at least in part because of safety concerns, since he took a couple of tumbles that season.

 

[murphyc]

If Bernard and Barnhart aren't fired for this, the series is done.

And 240 at Indy was not good. See Scott Brayton's crash.

More than once Bernard has talked about wanting to break speed records at Indy. Which would mean 240 at Indy.
Brainfart has done plenty to deserve getting fired, especially this year. I supported Bernard until he stood behind BB so staunchly. After Las Vegas, they indeed both should be run out of town.
The Texas CART "blackout" race was mentioned by crimson. CART couldn't have handled things much worse after safety concerns were brought up, but ultimately they did the right thing: they canceled the race due to unsafe conditions.

 

[Bulldog Smoltz]

If Bernard and Barnhart aren't fired for this, the series is done.

And 240 at Indy was not good. See Scott Brayton's crash.

More than once Bernard has talked about wanting to break speed records at Indy. Which would mean 240 at Indy.
Brainfart has done plenty to deserve getting fired, especially this year. I supported Bernard until he stood behind BB so staunchly. After Las Vegas, they indeed both should be run out of town.
The Texas CART "blackout" race was mentioned by crimson. CART couldn't have handled things much worse after safety concerns were brought up, but ultimately they did the right thing: they canceled the race due to unsafe conditions.

I can't say I follow IndyCar super closely, but I've always thought Bernard was in over his head. He seemed to know the promotional side of sports, but he seemed to lack actually racing knowledge and thus gave Barnhart too much say. It's all coming back to bite him now. I hope they're both canned.

 

[HanSenSE]

Reading Jenna Fryer's day-after story was a real education on what's wrong with Indy-type racing. Anyone see the cast of drivers they tried to lure for the $5M prize?

 

[Shoeless Joe]

Does Walt Disney World have SAFER barriers now? Seems that would be a good place for a race.

There hasn't been a race there since around 2000. Just the Richard Petty and Indy Car driving experiences. And those cars have governors on the engines so you can't drive at top speeds for obvious reasons. Hopefully, they would have them.

The Homestead track in Miami does have SAFER barriers up.

That's what I'm talking about. I know it's been a decade since they've raced there and only have the driving schools, but if I owned a race track in a destination location, I'm pretty sure I'd be working with everyone coming and going to get a race there. I don't know why they were hung up on the January date. There are 51 other weeks of the year. Get together. Work it out.

I guess Mickey can afford to just have it sit idle.

 

[derwood]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/sports/autoracing/worries-circled-las-vegas-track-before-a-pileup.html?_r=1

 

[Azrael]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/sports/autoracing/worries-circled-las-vegas-track-before-a-pileup.html?_r=1

Franchitti, who has driven stock cars and Indy cars here, said flatly, "Indy cars shouldn't be racing here."

 

[playthrough]

If Bernard and Barnhart aren't fired for this, the series is done.

And 240 at Indy was not good. See Scott Brayton's crash.

More than once Bernard has talked about wanting to break speed records at Indy. Which would mean 240 at Indy.
Brainfart has done plenty to deserve getting fired, especially this year. I supported Bernard until he stood behind BB so staunchly. After Las Vegas, they indeed both should be run out of town.
The Texas CART "blackout" race was mentioned by crimson. CART couldn't have handled things much worse after safety concerns were brought up, but ultimately they did the right thing: they canceled the race due to unsafe conditions.

I can't say I follow IndyCar super closely, but I've always thought Bernard was in over his head. He seemed to know the promotional side of sports, but he seemed to lack actually racing knowledge and thus gave Barnhart too much say. It's all coming back to bite him now. I hope they're both canned.

Bernard is what the series needs, someone who listens fans and had a knack for promotion. He knew that this job would be a long-term fix, but I think he was making inroads this year. Problem is, he inherited a bad formula with these cars on those tracks, and that's not something a guy in his position can fix so fast. He had to ride it out, in a manner of speaking. And, darn it, relief was/is just around the corner with the new car in 2012.

What he needs is better right-hand men in the racing-knowledge area, and that's where Barnhart is such a massive failure. He needed to be fired long ago.

And re: Johnson...yes, the fact that they're going to Talladega now is really effing rich. If that catchfence doesn't swallow up Edwards' car two years ago, Nascar would have been f*cked a million times more than IndyCar is now. So no lecturing from that series is necessary, thank you.

 

[doctorquant]

I didn't take what Johnson was saying as lecturing. Further, I don't think he was really referring to all ovals so much as he was talking about those intermediate Indy/NASCAR tracks such as Las Vegas, Texas, etc. I love watching the Indy cars when they're here in Texas, but it scares the shirt out of me because they are rockets on wheels and they handle like a dream, which means in close-racing scenarios you can see drivers get in some pretty hairy territory pretty damn quick. Much moreso than in NASCAR, where you've got bigger, heavier cars that the drivers are fighting the whole race. There's much less of a chance of those cars getting seriously airborne when something goes wrong.

 

[playthrough]

I don't disagree, but the headline I saw on some major outlets was "Johnson says IndyCar shouldn't race ovals." People run with that, and Johnson didn't specify for the writers there who wouldn't have known any better.

I'm curious to see what Tony Stewart says about all this.

 

[JackS]

Johnson really should know better than to say IndyCars shouldn't race on "any ovals." Indy is different from Milwaukee, which is different from Vegas, which is different from Iowa. What killed Dan Wheldon was a death-wish formula that the series had, until yesterday, dodged for years: banked mid-length ovals with cars featuring massive downforce and inadequate horsepower, resulting in high-speed packs. The formula is what needs to be fixed. Saying "all oval racing should end" isn't the answer.

Given NASCAR's monopolistic attitude towards other series operating in the United States, the Indy diehards generally tune out anything coming from that series unless it comes off Tony Stewart's lips.

The problem isn't IndyCars on ovals. NASCAR also through a slew of fatalities on ovals in the late 1990s-early 2000s with Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and, of course, Earnhardt. And road courses aren't immune -- Jeff Krosnoff died at Toronto, Gonzalo Rodriguez at Laguna Seca in the old CART cars.

Playthrough is right -- the biggest problem is the formula. Low-horsepower cars with mandated wing angles essentially created restrictor-place racing at 225mph. While it was spectacular -- the 1999 Texas night race and just about any race at Chicagoland are some of the most jaw-dropping races I've ever seen -- it was a major disaster waiting to happen with one slippage of a wheel. Kenny Brack, Ryan Briscoe, Davey Hamilton and Sam Schmidt were lucky -- they survived. Dan Wheldon wasn't. Couple that with Dallara cars that were workhorses, but had a real problem with getting airborne.

After Greg Moore's wreck at California, the CART "blackout incident" at Texas and the wheels going into the stands at Charlotte, there was a real concerted effort to slow down the cars and get them back into the 210s -- of course, they crept back up into the 220s at Indy -- but the result was underpowered cars and mandated wing angles, which created pack racing (or the Hanford device, which is nothing more than leapfrog racing and just as manufactured).

Lots of good came from that awful era -- IMS developing the PEDS, and then the SAFER barriers, HANS devices. And some good was coming from this late era -- the new Indy chassis was designed to have several built-in safety features including an aerodynamic undertray, smaller wings, wheel deflectors and rear attenuators to prevent cars from getting airborne as much as possible. The turbochargers should give more horsepower to force drivers to lift in the corners.

But what tracks are suitable? Phoenix is ISC-owned and gave the series an awful date last time (a Saturday afternoon?). Milwaukee is in mothballs. Michigan is probably the most suitable big oval, but it is ISC-owned and has pretty much given IndyCar the indication it's not welcome back (thereby forcing IndyCar to the awful street course in Belle Isle instead), while California has too much banking post-renovation. IndyCars on concrete is a wreckfest, so that tosses out Nashville and Dover. Gateway has been mothballed. PPIR and Nazareth were bought by ISC and closed.

Of the SMI tracks, Kentucky & New Hampshire are probably the most suitable, but both had major attendance issues this year (the mess from the Cup race at Kentucky appeared to have hurt the IndyCar crowd ... that, and the constant changing of the race date). It might be down to Texas, Indy and Iowa. Although if IndyCar were smart, it would run a Saturday night race at IRP the weekend of the Brickyard 400 and try to rent Phoenix and invite Marlo Klain's wedding party.

The other thing IndyCar needs to do is come up with something similar to the old AAA "1 car per 400 feet" rule for ovals. That's not really totally feasible -- it would mean 20 starters on a 1.5-mile track, 11 on a track like Iowa -- but something like capping the field at 20 at a 1 mile or less track, 26 at a 1.5-mile or less track and 30 at a 2-mile track (and 33 at Indy) would make some degree of sense.

But IndyCar needs to be on ovals. It's a major part of the open-wheel racing tradition in the United States, and IndyCar is the most diverse racing series in the world. CART and Champ Car made a huge mistake when they went to mostly (or in CC's case, all) road/street series and tried to become F1-lite, with a series of poorly-conceived street races that came and went, with a couple of gems -- Long Beach, Cleveland, Road America -- in-between a lot of schedule dreck. IndyCar needs not go that direction.

Great post from beginning to end. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the ovals raced back in the heyday of IndyCar...Indy, Michigan, Nazareth, Phoenix, Loudon, Milwaukee and you can throw in Pocono too. Those are all conducive to the cars, mainly because they are mostly flat.

That schedule was another casualty of the sport's split. It caused a big competition for new ovals, mostly on the IRL side. And the traditional ovals where attendance had been fine started fading away. So now the tracks (other than Indy) where there could be good, safe oval racing can't draw flies. Forget blaming Randy Bernard. This is yet another time you can blame that airhead Tony George.

 

[crimsonace]

That schedule was another casualty of the sport's split. It caused a big competition for new ovals, mostly on the IRL side. And the traditional ovals where attendance had been fine started fading away. So now the tracks (other than Indy) where there could be good, safe oval racing can't draw flies. Forget blaming Randy Bernard. This is yet another time you can blame that airhead Tony George.

I don't blame Tony George as much as I blame the Frances and ISC, although George certainly had plenty of missteps along the way.

At an early point, ISC was more than willing to cooperate and open up its new tracks to IndyCars to start selling tickets -- and race dates. But ISC got very monopolistic very quickly when the Frances began to take control of the NASCAR TV rights and began a scorched-earth policy of non-promotion and being flat-out hostile to Indy races. ISC shut down Pike's Peak with the caveat that no form of racing that involves spectators could be held at the track -- despite the fact that there is no suitable racetrack for a 10 hours' drive. ISC shut down Nazareth and dismantled it for reasons I'm still trying to figure out. ISC basically kicked IndyCar out of California and Michigan and its lack of promotion led to Richmond and Watkins Glen being dropped, and then it reconfigured other tracks (Homestead being the most notable) for stock cars, making them awful tracks for open-wheel cars. That the Mattoli family began to show no more interest in holding races as Pocono is also a shame, letting the track decline.

There need to be some more suitable tracks, but the problem is, nearly all of them are owned by the France family. The ones that aren't are in bad open-wheel markets (NHIS) or suffering from lack of capital/promotion (Milwaukee). Iowa is about the only track left that is really suitable for an IndyCar that isn't ISC-owned.