Two-time Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon died in a horrific crash Sunday during a race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Details here.
One excerpt that deserves a mention:
Drivers had been concerned about the high speeds at the track, where they were hitting nearly 225 mph during practice.
“We all had a bad feeling about this place in particular just because of the high banking and how easy it was to go flat. And if you give us the opportunity, we are drivers and we try to go to the front. We race each other hard because that’s what we do,” driver Oriol Servia said. “We knew if could happen, but it’s just really sad.”
Asked about speed after the crash, Wheldon’s former boss Chip Ganassi said, “There’ll be plenty of time in the offseason to talk about that. Now is not the time to talk about that.”
NPR has more on the track conditions:
The fiery 15-car pileup Sunday that took the life of two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon was the type of disaster that drivers had been concerned about before the race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, WDET’s Quinn Klinefelter said earlier on Morning Edition.
With a large, 34-car field on the relatively small, 1.5 mile track, drivers had said before the race that they were worried about what would happen if something went wrong as they tore around the oval at speeds topping 220 mph, Quinn said.
“No normal human being really has the reaction time to avoid anything” if cars started to collide at those speeds on a track that small, he added. Compare the field and track to this year’s Indianapolis 500, which Wheldon won: in that race, there were 33 cars on a 2.5 mile oval — meaning there was much more room to spread out and avoid trouble.
“It’s unfortunate that early on in the race they’ve got to be racing so close. …,” Team Penske owner Roger Penske said afterward, according to The Associated Press. “You always worry about those at these mile-and-a-halves at the speed and with this many cars.”
So why had the IndyCar series packed that many cars on the Vegas speedway? Race organizers “wanted to make it a real spectacle,” Quinn said, with lots of tight passing at high speeds.
Adding to the drama: If Wheldon had won the race, he would have shared in a special $5 million prize. The prize, to be split with his race team and a fan selected at random, had been offered to any non-IndyCar series driver who won the race. Wheldon was the only such driver in the race.
More to come for sure.