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

Thanks for posting. Athletes are rarely this soul-searching in interviews, even when a tragedy occurs.

 

Foyt blasts Jimmie Johnson for his no ovals for IndyCar stance in USA Today (link is from sister paper):
http://www.indystar.com/article/20111019/SPORTS0107/110190317/Defenders-Foyt-Andretti-back-racing-ovals

JJ responds by clarifying what he meant on Monday:
http://sports.yahoo.com/irl/news?slug=ap-indycar-wheldon-jimmiejohnson

Geez Jimmie, last thing you want to do is get Foyt pissed off at you. Just ask Arie Luyendyk. ;D

 

Marco Simoncelli killed in MotoGP Malaysian GP today.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/motogp/15420069.stm

The video of the crash is absolutely horrifying. RIP.

 

Video of the crash (which wasn't in the story linked above):

It's ugly. Simoncelli lost his helmet in the crash, then skidded for about 100 feet while laying face down (and presumably dead or unconscious) on the track.

 

Jesus, that's awful. RIP.

Odd wreck, too. Did he just slip off the bike coming out of the corner? It looks like he fell down alongside the bike and it pulled him across the track. Horrible.

 

Nicole Briscoe (wife of Ryan) did the Wheldon intro on the NASCAR pre-race and did an admirable job keeping it together. Her voice cracked a lot and she took a moment to say that while drivers may be good at compartmentalizing the danger, wives and loved ones don't necessarily have that ability.

At first, I thought it was horrible ESPN had her do it. It was her request, apparently, and she held it together, even while reading a eulogy of sorts. It was touching.

 

You never see T-bone wrecks in motorcycle racing. Something must have broke on Simoncelli's bike to make that come about. Awful.

 

She clearly wrote it. If I had the platform and one of my good friends died like that in a career where my spouse could have the same thing happen to him, I'd absolutely want to read it. I normally don't watch the NASCAR prerace show, but I caught her voice cracking and stayed with it.

 

Agreed.

 

If Rusty Wallace read it, the on-air eulogy would be something like...

"There's a somber breeze blowing through Indianapolis today. But it's not just any sort of air; it's clean air..."

 

"We remember Dan Wheldon, two-time Daytona ... I mean, Indianapolis 500 champion."

His "this is the greatest Daytona 500 I've ever seen" line notwithstanding, Rusty's worst on-air moment was, in a way, one of the most memorable moments of Wheldon's career. The day Paul Dana died, and Wheldon has just won (a huge win in his debut for Ganassi, which had put in a couple of really bad seasons in a row and Wheldon was getting second-guessed a lot for leaving AGR to go to a team that had struggled). Marty Reid asks Rusty what he thought -- and, obviously forgetting the pall of the day, he says "you couldn't get me out of an electric chair to drive one of those things."

IIRC, before they both got together with their current spouses, Nicole Briscoe and Dan Wheldon spent a lot of time together in the paddock. I was interested to see her perspective on things given they knew each other very well.

 

This does a great job of expanding on some of my earlier points...

http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/indycar-1995-cart-oval-calendar-worth-revisiting/

And here's another interesting story questioning the new cars for next season...

http://www.gordonkirby.com/categories/columns/theway/2011/the_way_it_is_no310.html