Since I was not home to watch the secondary race in Daytona Saturday, I looked for news at home.BBC News, my home page, was asking for spectators who may have seen the accident to provide details. My second look was Al Jazeera. Click here. That sounded like a pretty complete write-up. I do not need to know the names of the injured but I was interested in which driver might have been hurt. These were not the drivers who will be racing the major Dayton 500 which runs on Sunday, traditionally.
Then I decided to see what good old USA media did with the story. Huffington Post had complete video of the entire mess. Click here. Nevertheless, foreign news prints had the key details without the added color. In fact, the drivers are better protected than the spectators. it seems. The driver walked out of his car with no problems. The cars however would have totaled what a small family could retire on.
My first Indianapolis races were in the mid-fifties and early sixties. This was before all the safeguards for the driver and safety for the car had been invented and modified to where they are today. The proof is in that the driver could walk out of a crash that sheared off the front end of his car and stand by it a few moments later unscathed. Race car drivers are less of a danger than those on the highways who think they are drivers like the pros and that speed is the only object. The traffic on a racetrack is made up of other pro drivers. Our roads are old people who want to go slowly for safety, new drivers who are not yet aware of everything they should be watching, those who are disabled, handicapped, slower in reaction time, and all sorts of reasons that make it important to drive race cars on a race track with other racers. The rest of us, the typical Sunday drivers as we were once called, may just enjoy the sport from the stands (not too close to the track because you can't see as much from there) and feel the thrill of the race from the car cams which we follow.
My first Indianapolis races were in the mid-fifties and early sixties. This was before all the safeguards for the driver and safety for the car had been invented and modified to where they are today. The proof is in that the driver could walk out of a crash that sheared off the front end of his car and stand by it a few moments later unscathed. Race car drivers are less of a danger than those on the highways who think they are drivers like the pros and that speed is the only object. The traffic on a racetrack is made up of other pro drivers. Our roads are old people who want to go slowly for safety, new drivers who are not yet aware of everything they should be watching, those who are disabled, handicapped, slower in reaction time, and all sorts of reasons that make it important to drive race cars on a race track with other racers. The rest of us, the typical Sunday drivers as we were once called, may just enjoy the sport from the stands (not too close to the track because you can't see as much from there) and feel the thrill of the race from the car cams which we follow.
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