The Last Word

Since the tragic events of Sunday at Las Vegas have been rehashed and enough grief, blame and sorrow has been applied, we won't go into what happened specifically.

Suffice it to say that Dan Wheldon was killed in a monster crash on a 1.5-mile oval, and the racing world was rocked by it. Not only that...the non-racing world is in it too.

There's nothing worse than a bunch of sportswriters who happened to visit the track once as a lark get to speculating about what should have been done to prevent this tragedy, how IndyCar officials are money-grubbing tools who got the driver killed by staging an auto race, and how the sport should be banned.

I'm not a big fan of yelling at my TV, but I did so last night. Scared Sandy the Wonder Pup out of a full sleep, and my better half was not amused.

Here's the painful truth: sometimes, no matter how safe you make the cars, no matter how many rules you pass to make sure this never happens again, it does. Call it kismet, call it rampant physics run amok, call it anything you like, it can happen at any race track anywhere in the world, on any given day and to any given driver.

It just does.

Once the accident starts, in an Indy Car especially, there's nothing to do but keep your foot on the gas and go the opposite way from the crash. You can't stop, you can't steer too much and you do the best you can.

At Indy, I've seen Indy Cars hit the trap at the end of the backstretch at 251 mph. I've seen them hit the wall and become so many disparate carbon-fiber toothpicks. I've seen drivers walk away from crashes worse than Dan Wheldon's, and I've seen them not walk away from an innocent spin and wall contact.

It is what it is.

What is the weakest component on any racing car? The wheels? Tires? Engine? Nope. The driver. G forces, angles, impact length and severity...all are factors. Jimmie Johnson should have been hurt in his crash Saturday night, but he wasn't. It was a severe angle, the car hit with heavy Gs and the rear wheels jumped two feet off the track when he hit.

He drove it to the garage.

The safety systems worked. They worked in Dan Wheldon's case too...until he went airborne. There's nothing over his head once you get past the intake and the roll hoop, and when they fly, they take crazy angles. That's the story.

It happens. It hadn't happened since 2006, when Paul Dana was killed at Homestead. Just because it hadn't happened since then did not mean it wouldn't.

I've been around the sport for many years, and I worked at a newspaper specializing in motorsports that had published since 1934. Back in the day, drivers died in bunches. There was a day in 1951 at Winchester (Ind.) Speedway where drivers Cecil Green and Bill Mackey were killed on consecutive laps in time trials. The next driver out, Johnnie Parsons, set a world half-mile record.

This is not to take anything away from the tragedy of the event. I knew Dan Wheldon passing well, and I hurt as much as anyone. This is to make the point that sometimes, things like this happen, and you can't foresee it. You can take all the precautions you can, like IndyCar did, and it still happens.

To the clueless stick-and-ball guys commenting on racing: leave racing stories to those best able to tell them. You'll keep me from yelling at the TV and do the motorsports fan a great service.