Does a good job explaining which one was Weldon and you can clearly see the car hitting the retaining fence driver’s pod side first. Very unlikely to survive an impact like that.
RIP Dan W.
Hopefully they can improve some safety measures to reduce the chance of this happening again. Indycar seems to be the most dangerous racing series as far fatal accidents. F1 has not had a fatal incident since sennas death in 1994.
Need to find a way to keep the cars on the ground. Once they get up into that retaining fence it’s bad news.
Dan Welldone
Too soon?
Too soon.
yes, can we trade your life for his? too soon?
Man, so much negative outcome is just completely inevitable at 200+ mph. It really sucks that stuff has to happen. RIP Dan Wheldon, at least you were doing what you loved to do.
during the clean up i was watching and they said next year the cars are vastly improved in the safety factor. They really didn’t get into specifics so we will see what they actually do and is further progress is made especially after yesterday
the 5M purse was for any racing driver that was not a regular in the series. I believe 5 drivers were pre-selected to contend.
They had mentioned that Dan only had three races this year but he was working on the new safety designs for future cars through out the year. Weird.
So I got curious about this, and did some research.
f1 - 43
nascar - 44
wrc - 24
indy/champ - 10
Indianapolis 500 - 53
24 Hours of Lemans - 21
Now some of the numbers for F1 include drivers from the Indy 500 because it was a World Championship race included in F1 for a few years in the 50’s. So there are a few numbers that overlap. And the indy/champ numbers do NOT include the 500. I did NOT include track officials, or spectators in that because it would have shot sports car racing straight to the top (especially with the Mercedes/Lemans mishap in the 50’s since it was 100+ IIRC.). I also couldn’t find any good statistics on CART so that was not included either.
It always brings me back to 1955 when Mercedes killed like 88 people… in one crash.
Yeah I guess I should of mentioned it seems to be the most dangerous as of recently. I was just thinking recently there havent been any fatal crashes in NASCAR since Earnhardt and F1 since senna. I guess Indycar just had a fatality in 06 if I have that correct.
Open wheel racing with that many cars on that small of a track is just a recipe for disaster. End of story.
Are there any reasons why F1 would have less deaths? I know the cars used are different, but how else do they differ?
Please explain in dumbass terms please, as I don’t know much about either one of them.
In dumbass terms…
Indy = pin the throttle so when someone has an accident in front of you, braking isn’t what you are expecting to be doing.
F1 = road courses so typically speaking the average speed is lower and everyone is braking and crashing in the same place.
Some crazy photos from a British site.
There have actually been 2 deaths in NASCAR since Earnhardt. Tommy Baldwin 2004 and John Baker 2002.
Major races in CART racing has had 5 deaths from 1982-1999.
Much appreciated.