Indy Car driver Justin Wilson has died from severe head injuries he suffered at Pocono yesterday when he was struck in the head by flying debris from Sage Karam's race car, which crashed near the end of yesterday's race after it spun out of control. Wilson had been in a coma since he was transported unconscious to a hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He is survived by his wife, Julia, and two daughters.
Can't even begin to describe the loss I feel right now. He was my Brother, my best friend, my role model and mentor. He was a champion!
— Stefan Wilson (@stef_wilson) August 25, 2015
5 comments:
The Crapwagons with their 1978 technology, if that, claim another life.
You could not have seen those cars up close to suggest such a thing.
I know a lot about Racing. You must be easily impressed. Compare a 2000 Reynard to that piece of junk, tail-happy Crapwagon the IRL uses.
Is Dallara one of your clients?
Run the Panoz DP-01 if you don't like the Reynard for some inexplicable reason. A far better and safer car than the junk Dull-are-uh.
And what kind of half-baked "safety team" does the IRL have where a service truck, not a medical van, first arrives to check on a driver? It's a far cry from Dr. Steve Olvey and the CART Medical Safety Team open wheel had before Tony George destroyed it.
Now the IRL is talking about putting canopies on cars. That's novel, except engineers have been wanting to do that since the 70's, since a canopy reduces drag, cleans the airflow and makes the car go faster. Faster unsafe dangerous cars, just what they need.
Why can't the IRL accept what has been told to them since the mid 90's? Open wheel cars have outgrown ovals.
Damn. I was hoping for a Felipe Massa style recovery by Justin Wilson. If anything he wasn't like Jules Bianchi where he lingered on in a coma from October 2014 until last month after his off track shunt into a recovery vehicle in Japan.
"And what kind of half-baked "safety team" does the IRL have where a service truck, not a medical van, first arrives to check on a driver?"
A fire truck staffed by firefighters and at least one of which is a paramedic. Put any fire out first - they're running E100 in those cars so the fire is still invisible in daylight. The paramedic is the one straddling the nosecone of the car examining the driver.
"Now the IRL is talking about putting canopies on cars."
They'll talk about it but I really don't see it happening. Not without some mechanism like a jet fighter pilot's ejection system where the canopy can come off quickly. But a jet fighter cockpit uses explosives to remove the canopy. That won't work on a race car.
NHRA has dabbled with canopies in the open cockpit (Top Fuel, Top Alcohol, Super Gas, etc.) classes on and off for years. Driver extraction and cockpit heat are the primary problems with canopies.
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