Charlotte/Indycar Vegas/BTCC Finale

Adrian Fernandez:
"I was with Dan Wheldon and Tag in his trailer before the start and many others on the grid and none felt comfortable I could feel their fear."



This race should have never happened, and the drivers knew it. I know its accident, but damn its hard for me not blame Barnhardt or Bernard. Not all of it..but more than most of you are. This was just too obvious. I've seen about 10 people with tickets say they didnt go, because they saw practice and were sure something like this was gonna happen. There was just no way that was gonna go clean..No way.

What makes this even more sad...ESPN just confirmed that about 2 hours before the race, Dan Wheldon signed a multi-year contract to drive the #7 Godaddy.Com Andretti Autosport Chevy..


Apparently he was one of the only drivers GoDaddy deemed good enough to put in the car.

trbfan wrote:

This race should have never happened, and the drivers knew it. I know its accident, but damn its hard for me not blame Barnhardt or Bernard. Not all of it..but more than most of you are. This was just too obvious. I've seen about 10 people with tickets say they didnt go, because they saw practice and were sure something like this was gonna happen. There was just no way that was gonna go clean..No way.

I do agree with this statement, which I kind of alluded to in my final statement in my previous post. I think we as race fans take for granted the safety of the cars now. There hasn't been a death in AOWR in about 5 years, but there have been several near misses and close calls. Mike Conway at Indianapolis is a good example for this. It happens entirely too much, and this race probably should not have happened. But take into account how heavily promoted this race was. The championship race, Danica Patricks last race in IndyCar, the last race for this chassis. It was being treated more as a PR stunt than a motor race, which is just wrong on so many levels.

The thing as a whole is just bad for the IRL in general. IndyCar was in such an upswing, it's been struggling for a while but it really seemed they were headed in the right direction. Then they hype a race to try and garner as much attention as they possibly can and it ends 12 laps into the race, with quite possibly the most horrific crash in history and the loss of human life.

You can look at it both ways:

IndyCar officials could have called off the race after drivers told them their concerns.

or

The drivers could've either protested, or not raced at all.

You cannot place blame on someone for this, sure Las Vegas and other "NASCAR" tracks were not made for open wheel cars, but there was two or three, maybe even 4 wrecks there instead of the initial one. It's exactly like Talladega in the past (before tandem racing) where you have absolutely no time to react, you just hold on and hope. Pack racing in open wheel cars is never a good thing, but those drivers chose to drive like that and be agressive THAT early in the race.

Barnhardt and Bernard have made some bad decisions this season, but for what happened yesterday was a freak accident that no one can control. Dan Wheldon tried everything to miss the wreck, but there was a 2nd wreck that happen right in front of him, he was already lifting for the first wreck, but he was still going fast and couldn't stop. Maybe in his case braking and turning his car around would've ended better for him. When a car goes literally head first into the catch fence in an open cockpit, damage will be done, to the car, to the driver. It really sucks that it happened, but right now you shouldn't be throwing around the balme. You should be showing your respect to Dan Wheldon, his family, friends, and the entire IndyCar family.

You can't blame them for the crash and death of Dan, no one can. But you can blame them for the package they let develop over the years, and to throw out this whole little PR race with very little testing done at the race track before, expecting to the best to happen. They are all racers and unless it was a glaring issue that they saw before the race, they aren't going to protest it, but at least half the field spoke to Barnhardt and Bernard on not running the race due to safety concerns, but this race was surrounded around the allure of the PR like Sherm said, and there would of been no way they would of canceled the race beforehand.

You know theres something up when over half the field of top open wheel drivers are publicly concerned about "another 1.5 mile race" all of them knew and I'm sure some of you knew there was going to be some sort of crash from this product they brought to the track, but would of never imagined what happened yesterday.

Sadly Dan ended up losing his life, and its a damn tough thing to still fathom for me, and probably will be for a while, if ever to realize the guy is gone in a blink of a eye.

I know, I'm just saying that the drivers didn't have to race if they had concerns, it's like Talladega in 1969, the drivers knew they didn't feel safe to drive it, so they didn't. I know a few people needed to run the race (i.e. Power, Franchitti, Patrick, Wheldon, ect) but a lot of guys didn't have to race.

Would a field lock have helped like some people mentioned? There sure wouldn't have been 15 cars involved, but there still would have been the ramping off of the cars. The biggest issue was the pack racing, which would have happened at 220, 210, or 200. Would have happened with 26 cars, too. Could this have been prevented? Yes, as most other fatal wrecks could have been. Freak accidents happen, when you fly into the catchfence, bad things can and will happen.

I am truly sad and upset that the wreck happened and someone perished from it. It's sickening that they let it happen, and you look at how his children may not ever remember their father for who he was.

It was uncontrollable once that first guy touched the wheels with someone else.

Dan Wheldon renewed my enthusiasm toward auto racing with his Indianapolis 500 victory this year. The emotion behind that reminded me why I loved this sport: it lent itself so well to human drama, to the stories, to the passions.

And yet it's that emotion that makes it so cruel.

It gives this sport an ability to bring tears, to make my body shake, to make me absolutely nauseous over a man I've never met.

I can't help but think of his win at Homestead in 2006 in light of Dana's passing, and the amount of class he gave in his interview, as the reporter tried to disregard his comments about Paul and how the race shouldn't have been run and get him to talk about his battle with Hélio Castroneves, and yet Dan continued to take the high road and bring it back to what really mattered that day.

Those five laps felt like the last five laps of any auto race I ever wanted to see again.

I know I'll come back to motor racing, but right now, the sport's just never seemed so senseless and so pointless to me.

Dan was a hard racer. Dan was a brilliant guy. I wish I could still say is.

I had hoped to see 77 at the top of the scoring pylon at the start of the day yesterday, before the green flag dropped.

Little did I know I would.

And little did I know how much it would hurt.

I feel for his wife and for his two wonderful children.

We'll all miss him.

More irony even though yall probably already know this.


Yesterday was the first race that Greg Moore's father had been too, since Greg Moore's death in 1999.

This is a long read, but one I would highly recommend. It's a conversation between Dave Despain and Robin Miller from Wind Tunnel last night, talking about Dan Wheldon, and the state of IndyCar racing.
http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/speed-quotes-robin-miller-on-dan-wheldon-safety-concerns-in-indycar-series/

TheShermanator wrote:

This is a long read, but one I would highly recommend. It's a conversation between Dave Despain and Robin Miller from Wind Tunnel last night, talking about Dan Wheldon, and the state of IndyCar racing.
http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/speed-quotes-robin-miller-on-dan-wheldon-safety-concerns-in-indycar-series/

I'm not exactly sure what was/was not said in that, but here is the video from wind tunnel last night; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt0K0HT12qU&feature=feedu

A memorial site has been made for Dan:

http://www.danwheldonmemorial.com/

trbfan wrote:

More irony even though yall probably already know this.


Yesterday was the first race that Greg Moore's father had been too, since Greg Moore's death in 1999.

Not faulting you, but this is a case of a journalist not fact-checking on the basis of hearing something so "juicy" that he/she did not want to find it false, so just skipped the fact-checking process altogether.

It may be true on a technicality (i.e., first race he stayed for), but Mr. Moore has been to a few race weekends, notably Vancouver in the early 2000s. Perhaps he did not stay for those races and just for ceremonies, but he has not been absent from the sport, and I recall him having a presence at a number of events.

Regardless, very sad for Mr. Moore to have been there, and so similar in circumstance is Dan's passing to Greg's.

If anyone is interested, I made a personal reaction to what happened yesterday on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/notes/johnathan-i-thomen/my-thoughts-on-the-death-of-a-great-man-in-dan-wheldon/10150417384880395

I didn't find out about what happened to Dan until dinner with friends at a restaurant Sunday night. I'm not gonna say much, but this never gets any easier with each passing tragedy. It is the cruel reality of the sport we all love so much and something we all accept. It's so sad that it seems like it always happens to the most wonderful of people.