Thread: Indy cars

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The new Indy cars for 2012 have a lot of changes to add to driver safety. Catch fences are a brutal thing, at those speeds anything other then open track can be brutal. If the sanctioning body were to rule change everything about the cars and tracks so no body could ever again get killed.....well, you'd end up with a 55 mph Indy car on a 600' wide track lined with air bags.... Racing is dangerous, period. Everybody who gets in a car knows that and accepts the risk as part of the job. The builders and sanctioning bodies address safety issues and concerns constantly and do what they can to improve equipment and conditions. There are safety professionals and engineers employed full time to search out safety improvements, let them do their job and don't let a bunch of media hype lead you to believe that the track and race team owners are negligent in the areas of safety. There's always room for improvement, but it takes time and money.

More road courses would help, accept that the crowds go away. American's are used to sitting in a grandstand with a view of the entire track, not perched on a hillside somewhere way back from the track to catch a glimpse of the cars once a lap as they go by... There are a lot of Saturday night ovals that draw bigger crowds then the SCCA Nationals! Ovals are the preferred racing in this country....

There has been 4 deaths in Indy cars since '93. It's a shame that anyone has to die racing but it's also almost unavoidable if you want a level of competition high enough to attract the top notch teams and drivers. If you don't have that you won't have fans and sponsors and without that there's not gonna be an Indy cars. We almost lost Indy car racing when USAC and CART split... A knee jerk reaction to the death of a competitor doing what he loved to do isn't going to improve anything.

As a Post Script, how many people were even aware of Indy Car safety issues BEFORE Dan Wheldon was killed????? I guess it takes something like this to make it newsworthy enough for all the Monday Morning Quarterbacks (AKA media hype "experts") to get involved????? I caught a bit of a news report that had some European FIA dude more or less saying that Indy car racing was almost barbaric and all us stupid Americans should embrace F1 racing. The only thing Dan's death meant to him was a chance to promote F1 racing!!!! Be careful who you listen too, especially all these "experts" who don't even have a dog in the fight!!! Most are only interested in today's headline and will move on and forget about Indy Cars when something more newsworthy and grandiose that's deserving of their "expertise" happens....