# Unreal photos of Dan Wheldons crash



## ALLSKIING (Oct 17, 2011)

They have to stop open wheel cars from racing on oval tracks.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...yCar-champion-dead-15-car-pile-Las-Vegas.html


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## ctenidae (Oct 17, 2011)

F'in Venezuelans.

/instigator car is sponsored by PDVSA, the Venezuelan national oil company


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## kartski (Oct 17, 2011)

Condolences to the Weldon Family.

That race should have never happened. The CEO of the IRL wanted a show. It was the last race for that engine / chassis. It was like they took every last one that would pass tech inspection and put a body in it. Indy is 2.5 miles with much slower corners and they limit the field to 33. LVMS is 1.5 miles, with high bank turns that they just floor all the way around and they started 34. Lot of drivers with (R's) after their name.
 Dan won INDY this year but didn't sponsorship for the whole season ( He did a lot of high level Kart racing.), so the CEO came up with this race from the last row for $5 mil..
 There is also their head of safety, Brian Barnhart, that didn't say it wasn't a good idea.

 He was one of those drivers that would always talk to people. Good Guy Gone.


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## xlr8r (Oct 17, 2011)

RIP Dan

This death has hit me harder than any other in my over 15 years of being a racing fan.  So many things were wrong with this race and weekend in Las Vegas.  

Ovals are an outdated way of racing.  The USA is the only country in the world where high speed ovals are used for professional racing.


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## JimG. (Oct 17, 2011)

The race was a bad idea...the 5 million prize for Wheldon was a bad idea too. He was racing for his driving life and wound up dead.

But I think that banning ovals is not going to happen. It is uniquely American and it is the preferred style for many American fans of both Indycar and NASCAR.

This was a horrible crash; I was watching the race and it literally turned my stomach. I knew Wheldon was dead on impact...nobody could survive that.


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## Puck it (Oct 17, 2011)

The tub did it's job. It was completely intact.  It was the contact of the cockpit to the catch fence.  A canopy may have saved his life.  

I have been in the pits for these cars at few races. These cars are amazing and it is hard to believe anyone can fit into the cockpits.


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## drjeff (Oct 17, 2011)

JimG. said:


> The race was a bad idea...the 5 million prize for Wheldon was a bad idea too. He was racing for his driving life and wound up dead.
> 
> But I think that banning ovals is not going to happen. It is uniquely American and it is the preferred style for many American fans of both Indycar and NASCAR.
> 
> This was a horrible crash; I was watching the race and it literally turned my stomach. I knew Wheldon was dead on impact...nobody could survive that.



From a track design standpoint, what I STRONGLY feel needs to happen is that Speedway Motor Sports needs to STOP building the cookie cutter 1.5 mile medium/high banked tri-ovals!!  Atlanta, Charlotte, Texas, Kentucky, Las Vegas!  And to those tracks, they need to do something tomake them different!  Change the banking in some turns, whatever!  That layout produces the fastest speeds in Nascar racing (Atlanta) and that 225mphish pole speed for the Inday car series is insane.

Really emotional torn up about this.  I was out in Vegas last week and where I was staying at the MGM Grand was one of the host hotels and they had promotional info all over the place, Dario Franchiti's car was in the lobby and then I was able to watch a ceremonial "race" that they had Thursday night on the Vegas strip from basically MGM Grand/NYNY upto Plannet Hollywood/Aria/Cosmopolitan ad back.  Just a cool thing to see in person.  And a tragedy for not just the Wheldon family, but for Indy car racing as whole.  Since this season had both extreme highs, weird finishes, and a tragic ending


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## deadheadskier (Oct 18, 2011)

Definitely sad.

Truthfully I'm kind of surprised there aren't more deaths in Indy or Nascar racing. I know the safety technology is amazing, but a crash at 200+ miles an hour seems extreme for any car to endure.


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## SkiDork (Oct 18, 2011)

people are dancing around the actual cause of death but based on all the reports I've heard I'm guessing he was decapitated by the fence.


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## Glenn (Oct 18, 2011)

A very sad day for racing. Looking at the still pictures is rough. Even with all the safety these days, racing can be pretty dangerous at times.


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## drjeff (Oct 18, 2011)

SkiDork said:


> people are dancing around the actual cause of death but based on all the reports I've heard I'm guessing he was decapitated by the fence.



Based on the picture out there of Dan being loaded into the medi-vac copter where one of the EMT's/Flight nurses is squeezing the ambu bag to attempt to keep oxygen flowing into his system,  it atleast wasn't a full decapitation, but i'm guessing that his helmet took some serious impacts from that fencing the way that the cockpit of his car hit it.  The cockpit/tun actually did its job and appreared atleast to have stayed intact very well (as they're designed to do), and the way that the drives sit way down in the tub, there's actually very little of their helmet that is above, and hence exposed, the cockpit/tub.  That combined with the use of the harness and HANS device and there's not much movement of the head/body possible.

The biggest issue, as with any crash, be it of a race car or a passenger car, or even a bike is the g-forces the body faces as it goes through the deceleration from whatever speed to 0 in a very short time 

That was just a horrific crash.  And while I do hope that the Indy cars come back to Vegas,  I would think that they'll either have to use some type of restrictor plate to limit the top speed and/or reduce the number of cars on the track and maybe make some changes to the track itself.  Since that combo of speed + the number of cars + the track isn't safe for the Indy cars


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## bvibert (Oct 18, 2011)

Glenn said:


> Even with all the safety these days, racing can be pretty dangerous at times.



Racing is always dangerous.  Sure it's safer than it was years ago, but continuously pushing machines to their limits will always involve some amount of danger.


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## kartski (Oct 18, 2011)

Puck it said:


> The tub did it's job. It was completely intact.  It was the contact of the cockpit to the catch fence.  A canopy may have saved his life.
> 
> I have been in the pits for these cars at few races. These cars are amazing and it is hard to believe anyone can fit into the cockpits.



I've heard the Air Box / Roll Bar broke loose in the fence exposing the helmet. The car was covered, it's probably evidence. After Senna in Italy, this could be in the courts for years.


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## ALLSKIING (Oct 18, 2011)

Open wheel cars are 10 times more dangerous then a stock car. You don't see cars lift of the ground like that in NASCAR very much at all. NASCAR also has brought there speeds down and have done a great job with safety. There will always be danger and they can still makes things safer but since DE died in what 2003? Nothing has happened in NASCAR at all.


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## Nick (Oct 18, 2011)

It's amazing they are so safe at all... the cars come apart like paper mache  when they touch anything. RIP.


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## ski stef (Oct 18, 2011)

rip those pics are crazy...very sad


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## bvibert (Oct 18, 2011)

Nick said:


> It's amazing they are so safe at all... the cars come apart like paper mache  when they touch anything. RIP.



All the extremities break off fairly easily, but the cockpit is actually pretty tough.


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## Nick (Oct 18, 2011)

bvibert said:


> All the extremities break off fairly easily, but the cockpit is actually pretty tough.



Yeah I mean it blows my mind in general how safe you could be though with an exposed cockpit in any way. The fact that there is a 20 car pileup at 200 mph


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## o3jeff (Oct 18, 2011)

Scary crash and it was only a matter of time.

Like others have said, all the safety stuff did its job, but with all the lightweight parts on those cars at 200+ mph the fact is there really is not much safety, just a mess once the tires touch something.


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## mondeo (Oct 18, 2011)

Nick said:


> It's amazing they are so safe at all... the cars come apart like paper mache when they touch anything. RIP.


They don't come apart like paper mache at all, that's by design. With carbon structures, you gain the ability to fine tune the strength of the material in different directions. Instead of absorbing energy through yielding like metal does, the safety structures in CF cars are designed to break away when dangerous forces are seen, exposing fresh structure to continue to break away and absorb more of the impact.

Should be an F1 nose crash test, but I'm posting YouTube in the blind from work:


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## mondeo (Oct 18, 2011)

ALLSKIING said:


> Open wheel cars are 10 times more dangerous then a stock car. You don't see cars lift of the ground like that in NASCAR very much at all. NASCAR also has brought there speeds down and have done a great job with safety. There will always be danger and they can still makes things safer but since DE died in what 2003? Nothing has happened in NASCAR at all.


There hasn't been a death in F1 since Senna, despite achieving the same speeds. The fact that NASCARs don't lift off has as much to do with the fact that they weigh 3400lbs, not 1500lbs, and have brick like aerodynamics instead of a flat plate; ask Mark Webber if a closed wheel car can achieve lift off.

IRL will continue to race on ovals. The mix of ovals and road courses is what makes the series unique, and if you cut out everything other than Indianapolis, you'll start to see issues like F1 had at Indy in 2005. Cutting power isn't the answer, because that just ends up with stuff like bump drafting. So you either need to go to lower banking or reduced grip, so the cars need to lift, which breaks up the pack and emphaszes driver skill and the actual racing. The other thing that will help, and is already on the 2012 chassis, are features that prevent contact between tires. The thing that most often launches open wheel cars is tire on tire contact, and simply protecting the tires in front and back can do a lot to prevent take off.


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## mondeo (Oct 18, 2011)

kartski said:


> Condolences to the Weldon Family.
> 
> That race should have never happened. The CEO of the IRL wanted a show. It was the last race for that engine / chassis. It was like they took every last one that would pass tech inspection and put a body in it. Indy is 2.5 miles with much slower corners and they limit the field to 33. LVMS is 1.5 miles, with high bank turns that they just floor all the way around and they started 34. Lot of drivers with (R's) after their name.
> Dan won INDY this year but didn't sponsorship for the whole season ( He did a lot of high level Kart racing.), so the CEO came up with this race from the last row for $5 mil..
> ...


 
The $5 million purse was just part of making the race a spectacle, essentially part of an attempt to simply save the series from bad ratings. There have been a lot of rookies in IRL for a while, just because it's become a feeder league as much as anything else. And saying he just did a lot of kart racing ignores the amount of testing he had done on the 2012 chassis (which may have saved his life, which is one of the tragedies about the entire thing.) But no lift racing with identical cars isn't racing and is dangerous.



xlr8r said:


> RIP Dan
> 
> This death has hit me harder than any other in my over 15 years of being a racing fan. So many things were wrong with this race and weekend in Las Vegas.
> 
> Ovals are an outdated way of racing. The USA is the only country in the world where high speed ovals are used for professional racing.


 
We've always been the outlier in regards to the use of ovals. It has more to do with racing starting with horse tracks here, where it started on public roads in Europe.



Puck it said:


> The tub did it's job. It was completely intact. It was the contact of the cockpit to the catch fence. A canopy may have saved his life.
> 
> I have been in the pits for these cars at few races. These cars are amazing and it is hard to believe anyone can fit into the cockpits.


Canopies for these cars (and even the closed cockpits for prototypes) are more about protection from debris than impact protection. One would have saved Massa from his season ending (and potentially much worse) injury a couple years ago, but I'm not sure even a fully enclosed roll structure a la NASCAR or rally cars would save a driver from an impact with an obstruction above the actual crush structure. Roll cages/hoops are designed to prevent the car from crushing itself, not to absorb 200mph collisions.


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## drjeff (Oct 18, 2011)

mondeo said:


> We've always been the outlier in regards to the use of ovals. It has more to do with racing starting with horse tracks here, where it started on public roads in Europe.



Plus, you simply can't argue the fact that from a fan viewing perspective, the modern oval with high banks allows just about anyone sitting in the grandstands to view the full track, rather than just a portion and relying on where the TV feed is focusing on at that moment for the rest of it as is the case with the vast majority of road courses.  And happy fans tend to be repeat customers, and that's good for the sport





mondeo said:


> Canopies for these cars (and even the closed cockpits for prototypes) are more about protection from debris than impact protection. One would have saved Massa from his season ending (and potentially much worse) injury a couple years ago, but I'm not sure even a fully enclosed roll structure a la NASCAR or rally cars would save a driver from an impact with an obstruction above the actual crush structure. Roll cages/hoops are designed to prevent the car from crushing itself, not to absorb 200mph collisions.



I wonder if the next major leap in track safety will come from a new type of fencing, one that somehow doesn't rely on as many vertical, "rigid" metal poles to hold the fencing inplace, but argueably can cause more harm if a car gets airborn, above the safer barrier and into the fencing.  If something that is akin to how major league baseball hangs their nettting behind home plate, where it's relys on far less vertical supports, but yet still as the strength to keep a 200+ mph car inside the track, that might help in a sense to keep the car sliding along the fence and not potentially start them tumbling if they "catch" on a vertical support.  The forces and physics behind this are just so massive that at this time there likely isn't a way to do something like this


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## JimG. (Oct 18, 2011)

As others have said, automobile racing is inherently dangerous; injuries and deaths are unavoidable.

The catch fencing is clearly what wound up killing Wheldon; but the fences are there to protect spectators. There have been incidents where cars and debris wound up in the crowds killing fans. I believe any driver would rather face risk to his own life than risk the fans' lives. 

Someone mentioned the death of Ayrton Senna in Italy years ago; there was a lawsuit that dragged on for years brought against the Williams team he drove for. But that suit was based on evidence that team engineers had modified steering components to make them lighter but that ultimately lead to failure. This is a whole different story and I doubt there will be any lawsuits.

There will be modifications to the catch fencing, but the risk of death and injury will never be eliminated. And I think this is what bothers us all so much about Wheldon's death...deep inside, I know it isn't the last racing death I will see.


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