RIP Dan Wheldon

[PrettyBoy]

Originally Posted by Ghostwriter

I am a racing fan (mostly NASCAR) and Dan Wheldon was a class act. He will be missed. Prayers going out to his family and friends.

Bottom line is that an oval with banking is too fast for an Indy car. There is just not enough protection around the men and women racing these vehicles to protect them at speeds at a consistent 225 MPH. Once the cars hit top speed they hardly ever let off at these type tracks. Indy will have to curtail racing on banked tracks and stick to flat and road courses.

I agree. But, a lot of it is based on the way the energy from the crash is dissipated. As odd as it sounds, there has to be some "crush" involved when there is a crash. With Jimmie Johnson's crash at Charlotte, if there were a bunch of steel bars etc. in the front of the car, that would have been a much harder impact because it wouldn't have had as much crush factor in the front of the race car. I'm a huge F1 and Rally Car fan (European motorsports), but I do like a lot of the safety features they're using in NASCAR. Besides moving the driver to the right a little, and raising the greenhouse, they've installed energy absorbing foam in the right and left sides of the car. It just dissipates some of that energy if there happens to be a side impact. Bottom line, energy is always the major factor in any kind of auto accident, for both racing cars and road cars.