The Dodge boys were just the only ones that got caught. Plenty of places to hide nitrous in a car. Ask the Glidden boys.
Actually, the infamous bottle in the oil pan event happened in the pits during between rounds. Bottle heat soaked, blew the plug, blew the pan off and went spinning around on the ground. Crew chief picked it up with a towel and ran off with it. When asked, by officials he tried to tell them it was a fire bottle that blew up.
And then there is the funny bubbling gas that had been seen in some pits. "it's just off gassing"
Danica is a very pretty woman, but she doesn't have the kind of body I like a woman to have. Works to her advantage in a race car, though. In regards to a woman driver, I think she might be at a physiological disadvantage to some of the best guys in terms of her brain development, but then again so are a lot of men.
NASCAR requires a lot of skill and endurance. I don't see how people can think differently. They race a shitload of big, heavy cars close together at high speed for hours on end on a different track every week. From a mechanical and a driving standpoint it is a tall order to outdo dozens of other teams and win.
I mean, all that Bristol and Pocono have in common are the counter-clockwise loop. They otherwise require entirely different approaches from a racing perspective. How many Formula One teams have to go from a very long and technically challenging track one week to drag-strip bumper-cars another week?
NASCAR ensures there's no weight advantages. They assume each driver is 180. So if she's 110, they add 70lbs to her car. If you're over the 180, well, SlimFast diets should be considered, Tony Stewart.
They add a maximum of 40lbs to the car. If you have a 5lb driver, there will only be 45lbs of ballast in the car. Now, I had to look that up, so don't take it the wrong way. I only looked it up because I remembered some driver crying about her unfair advantage.
Travis was fun to watch near the end of today's race. He could not find a drafting partner so he was bounced around like a pin ball for thirty laps, but he still kept his speed.
They went to his in car camera on the wreck with five laps to go. His excitement about the event said a lot.
Sad to see 28 fans injured in that last lap crash.
I was watching on and off near the end of the race. I saw the big CF at about 8 laps left, then had the sound muted. The next time I looked up they were cleaning up the mess from the final wreck. Then I watched them pull a freaking ENGINE out of the stands where it had been ejected by one of the cars.
Holy crap.
This is NOT going to be good for NASCAR. I imagine the lawyers are already lining up.
"No stopping or standing along fence" and they sure don't have any shortages of U bolt cable clamps...which seem kinda tacky for a top shelf operation.(?)
looks like the safety stuff worked pretty good. No car sweeping through the stands, rolling through the crowd in a blaze of fiery doom. Yeah! Have to find a good video, looks like debris made it through.
Don't get all reactive and safety nazi yet, please. ( at least that's what I tell myself ) We've been confronted by accidents & crowd injuries as a problem of motorsports from the first horse race. If you get a great view you're too close.
One of my great pleasures in Motorsports is the Antique car weekend at Watkins Glen. You're camping out with Mustangs and Porches, Morgans and Lotus's circulating getting ready for the series of races. Close, real, and fun. Yes, a car can come through the fence. Yes, you can get killed. Same with all races, air, car, boat.... If you didn't want the real deal, don't go.
Now we do a lot, perhaps could do more, but more often over react, at keeping the cars out of the crowd. Road racing and streamlining has been badly set back by nasty crashes. The Auto Union car flipping through the crowd comes to mind.
I just watched the ESPN video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fQxnvFCu8M WHOA the whole front of the car ripped off...and the guy is fine! Speaks volumes for how well built these cars are, at least the drivers area anyway
I don't see any incorrectly installed clamps anywhere in the pic... Which ones am I missing? It does appear that some of them have slipped together during the impact. It is amazing to me that the pintle hitches held the cables in the pictures. I am assuming that is some sort of access point to the track. The pintles are rated WAY less than all the cables used.
AND...I just noticed in the bottom picture that Froggy posted....several open or broken pintle hitches. Those do NOT look good in my opinion to be using for that application AT ALL.
That was insane. They showed what they said were tire and suspension pieces clearing the fence and going into the crowd. Hope to hell those people are okay.
ESPN also showed footage of Earnhardt Sr. hitting the wall in what I assumed was the crash that killed him. I'm guessing it was the same turn.
(Message edited by boltrider on February 24, 2013)
ESPN also showed footage of Earnhardt Sr. hitting the wall in what I assumed was the crash that killed him. I'm guessing it was the same turn.
Earnhardt crashed coming out of the last turn onto the front straightaway; this crash was much farther down the front straightaway. There is virtually nothing in common between the two accidents except that they were during NASCAR races at Daytona.
BTW- the latest injured count is up to 33 people according to Yahoo news. The irony of all this is that a crash that wasn't nearly this bad led to the rules changes that seem to cause these kind of crashes at nearly every superspeedway race.
In 1987 at Talladega, when the cars were NOT equipped with restrictor plates and routinely exceeded 200 MPH, Bobby Allison was involved in a crash that resulted in his car going airborne and skipping along and ripping down a long section of the front crash fence. Understandably, this scared the living crap out of NASCAR officials. Restrictor plates were mandated which drastically cut horsepower on these tracks and limited speeds well below 200 MPH. Aerodynamic changes were made to the cars which made it harder for them to go airborne. However, these changes led to the kind of racing we have now, with packs of 20 or 30 cars running bumper-to-bumper, 3 or 4 cars wide at ~190 MPH, so that if ANYthing goes wrong, there's going to be a huge wreck.
I imagine NASCAR management is going nuts right now. Given their reaction in 1987, it seems we can expect an even bigger reaction in 2013, and I can't imagine what it will be.
The crash itself doesn't look nearly as bad as yesterday's crash, and I think only a few people were hurt, but it did rip down a huge section of fencing and I think that probably scared NASCAR more than anything.
That's why I urged deliberation in the wake of the accident.
Already people are calling for "better" protection for the crowd, the involvement of their congresswomen ( and men) and no doubt the out right BAN on racing, running with scissors, and all forms of fun that might harm anyone anywhere by accident....
When will people learn that he odds are your Congressman will do anything to stay in office but has zero knowledge of anything else? Asking Congress to involve themselves in racing means no more racing. ( nerf cars running on batteries with a top speed of 7mph behind tank shell resistant kevlar curtains and the spectators a minimum 600 yards away.... maybe ) The dumbest common denominator will triumph. I promise.
Yes, the restrictor plate issue/trying to slow them down is an ongoing problem in motorsports. Speeds much over 200mph are a different world, dominated more by aerodynamics than horsepower. THINGS FLY at those speeds, not drive.
But what I really meant to reference was a pre-war road race where the new ( and aerodynamically poorly understood ) Mercedes & Auto Union cars lost control and DID hit the crowd, almost ending road racing completely. Can't seem to find this online...so I may be confusing things....