A fiery crash takes the life of Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon and brings the IndyCar race in Las Vegas to a halt. Photo courtesy The Las Vegas Journal-Review.
Sunday’s tragic 15-car accident that killed race car driver Dan Wheldon has many people calling for changes to make the race safer. NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson even said that the cars should stop racing on ovals.
But it’s not the tracks that are the problem. It’s the cars. IndyCar needs to take radical steps to make the cars safer.
Wheldon was caught up in a massive wreck on the 11th lap of IndyCar’s final race of the season at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. His car rolled up on another car, launching it into the catch fence.
Johnson told The Associated Press that while the cars are great on street circuits and road courses, IndyCars should stop running on the high-speed ovals where they reach speeds of more than 230 mph.
“I don’t know how they can really do it,” Johnson said. “Myself, I have a lot of friends that race in that series, and I’d just rather see them on street circuits and road courses. No more ovals.”
But the series’ namesake – the Indianapolis Motor Speedway – is the type of high-speed track where the cars generate such dangerous speed. Ovals have long been a part of the sport and they’re not likely to leave them.
There seems to be four big problems with IndyCars: their open wheel design, tiny and open cockpit and extreme high-speed capability. IndyCars not racing at Indy? That seems preposterous.
Contrast the cars to a NASCAR racer. Those cars have closed wheel wells, roofs, a sedan-sized cockpit and are limited to about 185 mph.
Some of those problems could be fixed without removing them from ovals, which simply provide the best action of any type of track in racing. So many street and road course battles devolve into battles that hinge purely on starting grid position and pit strategy because it can be so difficult to pass.
No, the idea shouldn’t be to take the IndyCar off of the ovals. The idea should be to make the cars safe enough to race on ovals.
A huge problem has been IndyCar’s attempt to become the American-based alternative to Formula One. So IndyCars have evolved to look much like their European cousins. But F1 cars don’t race on ovals. Aren’t designed to run there and never will.
IndyCar should institute design standards that make them safer. Here are three design changes that would make the cars safer and might even improve the racing.
- Increase the size of the cockpit, to give the cars bigger crumple zones.
- Enclose the cockpit. This will radically change the look of the sleek racers, but what’s more important, a sleek design or driver safety?
- Reduce horsepower to a point where the cars average less than 200 mph on the ovals.
Some might say that IndyCar will never be safe so long as they have an open-wheel design, but that is unlikely to change.
But making the changes listed above would at least reduce the potential for catastrophic accidents such as the one that occurred Sunday.
But others continue to blame the track, including three-time series champion Dario Franchitti.
“You know I love hard racing, but that to me is not really what it’s all about. I said before we even tested here that this was not a suitable track for us and we’ve seen it today,” Franchitti told USA Today.
NASCAR has become the country’s most popular racing series because its cars are so evenly matched, making the racing about the driving. The cars are big, slow and dimwitted. By contrast, IndyCars are small, agile and crazy fast.
This is not to suggest that NASCAR has removed the danger from racing. Anyone who has seen the March 2010 incident where Carl Edwards spun and flipped Brad Keslowski’s race car can plainly see that any racing, even featuring NASCAR’s massive racers, is dangerous business. But Keslowski walked away from that crash.
Sadly, Sunday’s race was the last for the current chassis, which is being replaced by a new one featuring more safety devices. Will the new chassis actually provide greater safety? Time will tell. But it’s plan to see, the new chassis is still tiny and still has an open cockpit.
So long as brave men and women strap themselves into highly powered cars and race them, there will always be injuries and even deaths. But racing cars barely big enough to carry their driver with no roofs at crazy speeds is a recipe for disaster. IndyCar has an obligation to fundamentally change the cars to improve safety.
Actually, LVMS and Texas have problems similar to what NASCAR faces at Daytona and Talledega: very, very fast tracks that are beyond what the cars and most drivers are capable of. NASCAR’s solution is the dreaded restrictor plate. With it, most Sprint Cup cars top out around 200mph. Without it, they would be pushing 220+mph. It is “the track” only in the sense that the track makes it possible for a drivers to race way above their talent. NASCAR took a brute-force approach to slow the cars down, and in the short-term, IndyCar could consider something similar.
One of the others things we all saw at LVMS was a tight pack of cars, in part because they are pretty evenly matched on power (given they all start with the same base engine) and are on a track where the drivers don’t have to lift on corner entry. Plate racing in Sprint Cup results in a similar phenomenon, and also can result in The Big One, like we saw on Sunday. It is dangerous enough with a stock car. We saw how much more dangerous it is with an open-wheel and open-cockpit car.
I do think that some kind of closed-cockpit would work. The result could be a fighter-plane like appearance (which would look pretty cool). There are challenges that I see, mainly in two areas. The first is driver comfort and visibility. Keeping the cockpit cool, given it would be much smaller than a stock car, would be a trick, and the potential for humidity to fog any glass would need to be addressed. The other area is getting the driver out quickly after a wreck, and a system where the driver can get themselves out. The new IndyCar addresses some of that (note how many IndyCar drivers have trouble getting out without removing that bodywork “collar”, which apparently goes away in the new car). But any type of “bubble” would need to be easily removed, preferably without requiring external assistance.
Well, just from my point of view, slowing the cars down a bit would make sense. I’ve been a fan of Indy car racing for over 50 years, since I was a kid. I can remember listening to the 1959 Indy 500 on the radio when Roger Ward won, and I can remember when Hurtubise nudged the 150 mph barrier and the giant stir that caused. I can unfortunately remember when Tony Bettenhausen was killed, and the 1964 fiasco at Indy when Dave MacDonald and Eddie Sachs died in the fiery crash. And I can remember the escalation of speeds in the late 60s and early 70s, and every year Tom Carnegie announcing a “new track record.” Trouble is, the cars were beginning to go so fast that they were just a blur if you were sitting on the main straight. They are faster than ever now, and slowing them down a bit just actually might make the in-person experience better. But one thing they really need to do is to figure out a way to string the cars out a bit. I don’t like racing, whether it be NASCAR or Indy Car, to be run in packs. I’m not watching and waiting to see “the big one” but rather to see racing and passing. I get so sick of pit strategy and “lucky dog” and every trick in the world to make for an artificially close finish. I’d rather see racing for racing sake, may the best driver (not the best team necessarily) win on the track and not in the pits, and if the cars need to be shaped less like missiles to keep them on the ground, so be it.
@nwguy, yes, I think they could be made to look rather cool with a fighter pilot sort of cockpit. I think solving the fogging and cooling issues could be handled by ramming air through vents – the things are going 200 mph, afterall.
Bunching the cars could be a big problem, bigger than it is in NASCAR because of the open-wheel design of the cars.
I agree that restrictor plates are a bad idea. But there are other ways to reduce power such as limiting displacement or reducing the size of the turbo.
@r123t, the best part of racing is when there is the potential for passing. Big speed is fun, but I’d take exciting racing over maximum speed every day.