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

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.

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.”

 

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 shit 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.

 

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.

 

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.