Shane Hmiel

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Originally Posted by Scotty G.

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.

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I think that there are still many "unsafe" tracks out there.. We saw with the Greg Moore crash that Fontana had a particularly bad design in that in-field section of the track. But I can guarantee you that 50-75% of tracks out there have similarly risky design features that, in an rare circumstance, could lead to injury or death. I don't feel fair singling Pocono out, but there are a number of things that could go wrong there and leave a driver in a very perilous situation. A lot of street circuits are similarly risky in certain areas, in that RARE circumstance that a car enters or exits a corner in an odd way, or flips over a barrier. We like to think that best efforts are being made to make these as safe as possible, but the reality is that costs are never going to allow every track to be 100% safe, particularly not when fans want a wide variety of tracks in a wide variety of locales.

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Originally Posted by Starter

That is what the cage is (supposed to be) built for. There are many instances of cars getting airborne and coming down directly on the cage. All portions of the cage top, side impact, etc should be made of the same gauge material and welded and cross braced appropriately. This looks to be an incident where the forces applied were simply in excess of the capacities of the cage design.

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A roll cage is built to protect the drive in a roll. In a roll over, energy is dissipated over time as the car continues to roll. In this case, the impact on the top of the roll cage is not stopping a car going 100MPH all on its own. The roll cage, along with the tires and side pods dissipate the energy as the car rolls. In this instance, the car went from 75 MPH or so to 0 MPH in about 0 seconds, with all this force on the direct top of the roll cage. There was no chance for the car to dissipate the energy in a roll.

how is he doing? has there been any updates? it looked like a terrible accident.

unfortunetly motorsport has risks and can never be made 100% safe.

See my comments in the NASCAR forum.
No matter what we do or legislate there will be deaths, or almost even worse life crippling injuries in racing.
I raced in an era when there were drivers killed or crippled almost every weekend. Far too many people I knew died.
I was lucky. I had two major suspension failures on airport tracks. At a real road course it would have been big time trouble. And I rarely raced on airport tracks!
We can never make Motorsport a 100% safe but we need to do all we can.
Also remember many tracks are not making much money and safety upgrades can cost big money.
No promoter/owner wants to see a driver die or be crippled but he also does not want to go to the food bank to eat.