First thing I thought of was Greg Moore's accident, but at a much lower speed. Thank goodness Shane is still alive.
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First thing I thought of was Greg Moore's accident, but at a much lower speed. Thank goodness Shane is still alive.
My first thought was what did they make the roll cage out of? Aluminum? I thought the whole point of the roll cage was to protect the driver....but it appears in this case, it caved in rather quickly....Quote:
Originally Posted by Chamoo
I wish the man a recovery from this and may he live to have a normal life....but this sad accident seems altogether too easy to duplicate...how many of us have seen sprint cars go out of control like this?
I was originally going to ponder on the lack of SAFER style barrier, but presumably that's not really feasible on the short tracks?
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Originally Posted by Mark in Oshawa
Mark, in this particular accident, I don't think the roll cage had much of a chance. That was a EXTREMELY hard and solid hit in a perfect spot. Even if with a SAFER barrier, that was going to do a lot of damage to the driver. All the safety measures in the world, can't protect you 100% of the time.
This sort of accident is VERY rare in dirt sprint car racing. Most of the time, when a car gets airborn, it goes up and not out (if you know what I mean). Usually, it lands on its "roof" and the driver climbs right out. Or if it does go "out", it doesn't hit a solid wall first (and by the time it lands it has scrubbed off a lot of speed). This one, was one of the rare ones where very little speed was scrubbed and the car took off and hit the wall square, driver first. If it had just hit a slightly different angle (not as square), he might have still had some injuries, but they likely wouldn't have been as potentially life-threatening.
I think the safety measures that are being implemented now, probably saved Shane's life. So for that, we can be thankful.
Very tragic accident on several levels. Obviously, nobody likes to see a driver get injured. But he had battled back from virtual racing extinction and by most accounts, had turned his life around. He was well-liked in USAC and well respected by fellow drivers for his talent and his willingness to "work his way back up" the ladder the hard way. He was likely headed towards Indy Cars in the very near future.
Sad, on many levels.
I think the above more or less sums it up. Sometimes, bad stuff just happens. There was a crash in the Lamborghini Super Trofeo at Brno a few months back where a car spun into a transition between a concrete wall and armco barrier at just the right angle and the safety cell was literally torn apart. The car more or less disintergrated, the fuel cell ruptured and the whole lot went up in flames. The driver survived, but was badly injured. There were some questions about the wall he hit and whether the transition could have been better protected, but had he impacted at any other angle, he'd have bounced off and just spun down the track. It was one of those one in a thousand crashes where the car hit the worst possible place in the worst possible way. The reverse is probably true of Mike Conway's Indy crash. He hit in the best possible way, given the circumstances. There are some things you just can't plan for.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scotty G.
Exactly right.Quote:
Originally Posted by hornet
A very similar accident occurred in turn 3 with Tony Renna in the fall of 2003 (I think it was 2003) at IMS and we all know how that ended.
Conway was very fortunate.
The reason the roll cage didn't work the way you suggest Mark, is in it's name. It's job is to protect a the driver from roll overs. This was not a roll over. This was a direct impact on the top of roll cage, like Scotty said, which is not what the roll cage is built for.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scotty G.
It's actually probably better that the cage crushed in a little bit, as had the cage remained rigid, the energy would had been transferred through the seat and into Shane's back, making an instant death much more likely.
Yep. Read enough about Renna's crash to know the aftermath can't have been a pleasant sight. Sometimes it's just dumb luck. Richie Hearn had more or less the same crash as Greg Moore, yet a small difference in the initial conditions led to an extreme difference in outcome. You can make tracks and cars as safe as possible, but there's always going to be the unknown. Sadly, we only tend to learn how to make things safer after a bad crash. Nobody was concerned about the tree in front of the catch fence at Toronto until Jeff Krosnoff's crash. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. In all the years since, I can think of two, maybe three similar crashes where a car has taken flight and impacted trackside furniture. There are some things that simply can't be legislated for. You can't possibly design a car with every possible accident and impact in mind.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scotty G.
Memory was a bit hazy. Having re-watched it, there was a fence of some form on the drivers right, but it was set back about three feet from the concrete barrier at trackside. I'd had in my memory that he'd hit the tree, but he kind of glanced it through the fence and then impacted the light pole, which was exposed. The point being it was such a freak accident that nobody had ever considered the exposed light pole or lack of proper catch fencing a risk, and he hit in a way that was outside of the "normal" types of impact on that sort of track, so the car design hadn't considered it. You can try and minimise the obvious risks, but you're never going to remove them all, and eventually something will happen that exposes that risk. There was a recent crash at Brands Hatch where a car got punted off track and launched by the barrier, causing it to roll and then bounce over a section of barrier with no fencing, landing in a spectator area, thankfully without injury to anyone. There was a huge internet outcry about the circuit being unsafe (using everything from Johnny Herbert's crash to the Henry Surtees fatality as justification), but it was simply a case of the car going off in an unusual way at an unusual place. There was no full fence there as it wasn't a "normal" place for a car to go off. In the Hmiel incident, I know those cars regularly flip and tumble, but I can't recall seeing one take a square-on roof first impact before? Only thing I can think of that comes close is the Russel Phillips crash, although I think there were other car construction factors in that?Quote:
Originally Posted by Starter
Quote:
Originally Posted by hornet
1. I have heard horrific "2nd hand" info on the Renna crash. Thank goodness, it happened in October with no cameras around.
How that crash actually happened, is still one of those great racing mysteries, that we might never know. I have heard it might have been cold tires (since he was on his 1st or 2nd hot lap of the morning) or he might have hit a bird. Whatever it was, it was awful. And of course, the end result was tragic.
2. Exactly right. You can build the safest, most perfect race car ever built and put the drivers in the best safety stuff ever created and all it takes is one of those "one in a million" deals to still hurt or kill a driver.
With the Hmiel crash, you had people immediately blaming the track or the roll cage or if the car was "up to spec". There was likely no one to blame in this deal. Hmiel was on his qual lap and was shooting for the front row. He is very talented and can gas it with anyone in USAC. That's racing though. If he has that same accident 999 times out of 1000, he likely flips, lands on the ground, maybe gets his bell rung, gets in a backup car and tries to make the feature in the 2nd chance race. This was just that one time out of 1000.
Racing is certainly safer at all levels now, then its ever been. Sadly, injuries and deaths in sprint car racing were the norm in the 50's and 60's. Now, when a Hmiel has a serious accident with terrible injuries, its a huge story. Those happened all the time in the old days.
The only thing about the Greg Moore crash that many people had problems with, was the grass surface that his car traveled over at Fontana. That was one of those things, that should have been fixed long before that particular race.