I was shocked at the pictures of the crash which took Dan Wheldon’s life yesterday. Not being familiar with Indy I can only compare what I have seen with Formula 1. I am used to seeing the occasional huge crash, heart in mouth, only to learn that the driver not only survived but, more often than not, only receive minor injuries, the last F1 death was Ayrton Senna in 1994. I was particularly taken aback by the number of cars in flames and what appeared to be fuel gushing from damaged cars as they careened across the track. I can’t remember the last time an F1 crash resulted in a serious fire.
This is largely due to the ever-increasing safety regulations in the sport designed to protect the drivers and spectators. But there are also big inherent differences between Indy and F1. At few F1 circuits are the cars hemmed in by walls. It is also unusual for F1 races to be quite so crowded as in Indy, after the first corner the race generally settles down into several sub-races. Can these differences account for the terrible scenes yesterday in Las Vegas, or can Indy also learn something from F1 car design in terms of safety?
Thing is, F1 cars never race on ovals or anything like it so they optimise for lower speeds, different drag and acceleration options. the upshot is that, though they could reach 230 mph+, they never do. Therefore any major crash is going to happen at a maximum of 180-190 mph.
Indy cars on an oval are constantly over 200 mph, solid barriers are never too far away and there are more cars on the track at the same time. So there is a higher risk of a big impact and though those extra 10-20 mph may not seem like much, the magnify the energy of the crash enormously.
It may be that there is only so much one can do to prevent fuel tanks bursting upon impact.
I think this is the biggest factor. Watching F1 races, it seems that cars usually tend to “bunch up” mostly entering corners, where they’ve slowed way down. The crash in LV was a lot of cars bunched up and traveling at high speed. If someone ahead of you spins or crashes, you practically have no time at all to react.
Mark Webber got airborne in a crash last year, Michael Schumacher got slightly airborne just a few weeks ago in the Singapore round. Open wheel racers are designed to be reverse airplanes, using air pressure to keep the car on the ground instead of providing lift. However, you change the angle of attack of those wings suddenly and the cars generate lift instead of downforce. Indycar had a previous close call just this year on a street circuit (same type of circuit Webber got airborne at last year).
What you have in F1 is usually two, sometimes three, rarely more cars crashing at once. Not 15.
I’ll also mention David Coultard nearly decapitating Alex Wurz in Australia 2007. Sure safety is better than the bad old days, but death is always a non-zero possibility at any motorsport event.
Sooner or later the subject of Indy Car speed on a 1.5 mile oval will come up. The obvious: they run 20-30 MPH faster than the NASCAR stock cars on a track that is 1 mile shorter than Indy. Offsetting: the aerodynamics/handling of an Indy car is superior to stock cars and the Las Vegas track is banked, while Indy is not. Not sure about the difference in track width.
It will be interesting to see whether Indy cars reurn to LV.
IndyCar is moving to a new car and engine formula next year which may change the racing style, but I really doubt an insurance company will issue a policy to cover a return in the near future.
It is fair to say that,even given the tragic events in Las Vegas, all high-performance racing vehicle are a quantum leap on from cars of the 60’s and 70’s.
Really heartbreaking. Some remarkable interviews in there with some of the greats and reminiscence of those that didn’t make it. This documentary is one of the reasons that the fire gave me such a fright.
I think the inherent safety of F1/Indy equipment is likely on a par. The big questions are how the race organisers set it up. 34 cars at 220+ mph and no run off? Given a 1.5 mile oval the most you space the cars apart is about 65 yards.
One factor is that the crash was an aberration. Such crashes are unusual in Indy racing and the crashes that happen seldom result in fires. I have seen some terrible Indy Car crashes and the driver walked away.
There is a huge difference in how the cars run. You seldom see an Indy driver recover from the least twitchiness in a corner. The best outcome is a spin without making contact. The F1 cars jerk and jiggle around the sharper turns and much lower speeds.
Anybody have a figure for the weights of the cars? My guess is that the Indy cars are heavier and sturdier. After the Cart split, the next generation of Indy cars were heavier and sturdier.
Although their attitude is publicly tell their drivers to “have at it, boys”. Apparently according to Ryan McGee’s chat today of ESPN, an anonymous “Driver X” said as much in a recent ESPN magazine that older NASCAR guys feel that the younger drivers feel bulletproof.
As I understand it, because the IRL had inferior talent they made the cars with high downforce and lower horsepower. The result was you could hold the pedal to the metal all day to run at top speed instead of having to slow down/brake when hitting in the turns like CART cars did. When the merger happened, they kept the IRL cars.Well, you get a bunch of cars running three wide at 220 mph, disaster can happen.
As bad as this was, it could have been worse. There were 15 cars caught up in these two accidents that happen almost simultaneously. You easily could have had more than one death if this was 20 or 30 years ago.
Truly heart-rending isn’t it? Can you imagine such a situation today?
The sport has come so far in such a short time. It will be truly tragic if idiotic decisions at the race management level negate all the technological advances.
You understand incorrectly. The IRL was created because costs were spiraling out of control in CART and chasing American drivers away from what was then the premier American racing series. That, and Tony George’s ego, but that’s another story.
Anyway, the one thing that saves costs is uniformity. It became essentially a spec series with collective R&D going into the cars, everybody ran one of two chassis and a spec engine. Naturally, this slowed the cars down a bit, and the drivers initially were typically second-tier drivers so everybody believed that the cars were slowed down because of the drivers. Not so.
A car that wants to win will always be treading a fine line between drag and downforce. And through a corner (any speed of corner) they will be on the edge of traction. So when you consider that an F1 car may spend 50% of the lap on low-mid speed corners and on an Oval it might be 80% on high speed corners, you don’t need to be a genius to imagine what may happen.
There are substantial differences. An F1 car “dry” (no fuel or driver) weighs around 520 kgs, an Indy car around 700kgs. that is an enormous amount of extra mass to factor into the accidents. Sturdier? I don’t know. Certainly the “survival” cell of an F1 car is an amazing piece of engineering that almost certainly ensured the survival of Robert Kubica in the crash linked to above. I’m pretty sure that Indy cars follow that design philosophy as well. One hopes that if anything, the Indy cars are stronger as the average impacts energies are much higher and the most common accident profile is rather more severe.
