So when we see a massive crash, as we did in Sunday's Indianapolis 500, passionate commentary on social media comes to the forefront. Some of it carries weight and moves the narrative forward. Some of it is uninformed and does nothing but give some instant gratification for the poster.
The safety debate is a mysterious one to me, because I've yet to find anyone in the sport who thinks it's "too safe." There are people whose job, 24 hours a day seven days a week, is to make things safer. The drivers, whose asses are strapped into these 200 mph rocketships, want to know when they go barreling off into the turn that they're going to come out the other side, even if things go askew before they get to the next straightaway. And me, an unemployed former motorsports journalist without an editor, well, I know thousands of racecar drivers. Literally thousands. I want each and every one of them to race, and occasionally crash, and go home to their wives, their husbands, their boyfriends, their girlfriends, their children, their dog or their cat, and their friends each and every weekend.
But I know that's not always going to be the case.
Yes, this is a dangerous sport. Sadly, there will inevitably a driver that pays the ultimate price behind the wheel of a racecar. No matter what safety advances we make, it's going to happen. Containment seats, headrests, HANS devices, SAFER barriers, energy-dissipating zones built into the chassis, improved helmets, you name it, it all works wonders. And at some point, it's not going to be enough. There will be some set of unforeseen circumstances that conspire to take away one of our heroes.
And it sucks.
We should learn all we can from every accident, whether it involves injury or not. Maybe lessons learned in some seemingly meaningless incident will help someone down the road in a more significant incident. That's how it should, and truthfully does, work.
So when Scott Dixon sailed over Jay Howard and flew the length of a football field into the catch fencing, landing in top of the wall with the side of the tub, it was no real surprise that many watching said Indycar racing is just too dangerous and we need to do something to make it safer for the drivers.
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| Paul Dana perished in a crash at Homestead in 2006 |
Is Indycar racing dangerous? Sure it is. The cars are 230 mph rocketships racing between concrete walls on a track that was designed and built when cars could barely break 80 mph. While NASCAR has had an unprecedented streak of good fortune when it comes to driver fatalities since 2001, Indycar has lost four drivers in accidents over that same span (Tony Renna, Paul Dana, Dan Wheldon, and Justin Wilson).
Wilson's death at Pocono may be the one that causes the most consternation, and honestly it should. He was not involved in a crash, he was merely passing by an accident scene when the nose cone of another car literally fell out of the sky and hit him in the head, causing fatal head injuries. Many observers say that is the accident that proves we need canopies on these cars, to ensure that never happens again.
I must make this clear: I am not opposed to canopies. I have seen designs with canopies incorporated and many of them look really cool. But here's my concern: what happens when the car flips and lands with the canopy wedged next to the wall and is fully engulfed in fire? What happens if there's a fuel spill and the cockpit fills with methanol and it ignites? I can think of many more instances where a canopy becomes a hindrance that could cost a driver his or her life.
And here's the puzzling thing: I've yet to see one active Indycar driver who has come out completely in favor of enclosing the cockpits. Maybe they're all buffoons, as I apparently am. But one would think the opinion of the men and women who do this, whose lives are on the line, would mean something.
Yes, many drivers were opposed to head and neck restrains back in 2001. NASCAR drivers were outspoken about full-face helmets in that era too. But safety wasn't the priority back then as it is now. Drivers are much more informed about their own personal safety and the risks involved than they were then. So when no Indycar driver will go on record saying he or she won't compete unless and until the cockpits are enclosed, that carries some weight with me.
Racing is a dangerous game. The risks are high, but so are the rewards. Why do these Indycar drivers risk it all? Everyone has their own reasons, but the will to win and have their likeness forever etched onto the Borg-Warner Trophy is surely a driving factor. Many of them (not all, I know) have achieved great personal wealth too. For others, it's chasing a dream. In any case, to them, those rewards make the risks acceptable.
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| Sometimes people do things that make no sense, and that's okay. |
Why do people walk on tightropes over the Grand Canyon? Why do people jump out of airplanes? Why do people climb Mt. Everest? Why do people tie a bungee cord to their ankles and jump off a bridge? Who knows, but no one forces any of them to do it. Same thing with driving racecars. I have yet to meet a single racecar driver who is there against his or her will. They know the unique risks their chosen thrill carries, and they have accepted them. They make the choice to do it.
Whether you're a journalist covering the sport, a mechanic building the cars, or a fan with a Twitter account, your concern for their safety indeed carries weight, but the drivers know the risks and do it anyhow. I, for one, respect that choice. It doesn't mean I don't want to see it be as safe as it can be, not by a long shot.Scott Dixon is very lucky to walk away from an accident that could have easily had a much worse outcome. It's a game of inches, and the inches were in his favor. Had anything else been different, we could be saying goodbye to another of our heroes. But I could also say that had anything else been different at Pocono in 2015, Justin Wilson would have been racing on Sunday. The inches, sadly, were not in his favor and we're all the poorer for it to this day.
So what is the answer to driver safety? Well, there isn't one. It's never going to be "safe." And that's okay. If the human body was designed to go 230 mph, we wouldn't need a car to do it. So we use the safety apparatus that is available now. We continue to learn and to innovate, and continue to make gains when and were we can. Maybe one day there will be a canopy that achieves everything we need it to achieve without compromising safety in other areas. I don't think there's a single driver that would be opposed to that.
I know this may not be a popular opinion, and that's okay. I may be a buffoon, and that's okay too. But what I am not is someone that hasn't spent time pondering this and developing my opinion on this through experience. It's the product of 44 years of being around racing. It's the product of conversations with thousands of racecar drivers, seeing millions of laps in thousands of races at hundreds of racetracks. Call me names if you must, just don't call me someone who doesn't care and doesn't put a lot of time and energy and thought into this sport.
