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loque
You know... every so often this happens on ovals and everyone says that it's a risk that they all take, etc etc. But the simple truth is that the cars are too fast and too light for their speed. How many deaths will Indycar allow before they start making some changes? I know they are heavier than F1 cars but they still flip FAR too easily after front-end contact. I counted three in that accident alone. When Senna died, F1 took a step back and said... this is too dangerous, we need to make X changes, and the result was no more deaths.
The cars are too fast for the nature of circuit and style of driving that brings. It's (usually) fine in NASCAR to run at 200mph side-by-side as that doesn't often result in much more than a bit of barging and angry reactions - seldom does it result in a big accident, and even less so in such a horrific one. Sadly accidents like this do still happen in NASCAR, with cars launched into the catch-fencing and being shredded.
It's nothing to do with weight though. An F1 car weighs 640 kg including the driver. An Indycar apparently weighs 691.7kg without the driver. F1 cars are just as likely to get airborne at high speed - the difference between 160mph and 220mph isn't likely to stop a car becoming airborne, as Patrese, Webber and many others have shown. If the car gets slightly off the ground and the air underneath them, they're helpless. The car could weigh double what they do and they would still fly. As we know, the downforce provided by the wings at those speeds is more than the weight of the car, and still the front lifts. The other issue with weight would be the effect in accidents - for more inertia would offer more serious accidents in what might otherwise be an innocent one.
Whether Wheldon was killed by the wall or the catch-fencing (from the video it looks like his car went top-side first into both, running on top of the wall upside down for a few moments before it was grabbed by the catch-fencing) I don't know, but either could have killed him. As unsurvivable accidents go, that's one of the the worst I've seen - it's odd thing to say, but with some accidents, you feel there's a hope, but sadly Dan didn't have a chance. Short of removing the catch-fencing and replacing it with some sort of perspex wall, I can't see what else could be done.
Any number of drivers could have been killed yesterday. Pippa Mann and Will Power had horrific crashes at the same time, Mann travelling like a missile into the wall upside down and Power covering a ludicrous distance in the air at an insane height. The distance from Power's shadow to his car shows just how high he was.
RIP Dan.