Tragedy highlights IndyCar safety shortcomings

HARD though it may be to believe now, it’s not so many years ago that the death of a top racing driver in some horrific fireball was almost commonplace.

So many of Formula One’s greatest stars were wiped out that there were often calls for the sport to be banned due to its appalling safety record.

Yet such have been the improvements to cars, circuits and all the associated paraphernalia in recent years that even serious injuries are now mercifully rare.

What a shame motor racing’s other manifestation, IndyCar racing, has so patently failed to provide its star performers with a similar standard of care and protection.

The death at the weekend of British IndyCar ace Dan Wheldon has sent shivers around the world of motor sport and rekindled grim memories of similar tragedies in years gone by.

The 33-year-old may not have been a household name in this country but there is no doubt he was a genuine champion, twice a winner of the Indy500. Pictures of the 15-car pile-up that sent his blazing car somersaulting on the Las Vegas track were truly terrifying.

Britain’s two Formula One star drivers Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton led the tributes to Wheldon. Button felt a personal pain as he and Wheldon were contemporaries and had once been rivals on the karting tracks.

Like Wheldon, both Button and Hamilton have tasted enormous success as champions in their respective disciplines. That fate sent Wheldon’s career on a different track, fighting for supremacy on America’s super-competitive IndyCar circuits, may have cost him his life.

Certainly, as McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh said, the tragedy at the weekend highlighted the bitter contrast that can exist between the highs and lows of such a high-octane sport.

Former Formula One champion Jody Scheckter, whose own son took part in the Las Vegas race, described IndyCars as the most dangerous form of motor sports, and other leading names have been fiercely critical of the safety standards employed.

With 34 cars scrapping for supremacy on tight tracks at speeds of up to 220mph, there is so little room for error that the odds are stacked against the drivers. Major pile-ups are all but inevitable.

The repercussions from Dan Wheldon’s death are impossible to predict. Top-level sport invariably has to possess an edge of danger and to eradicate that would be to dilute its appeal.

But Formula One has moved safety – of drivers and spectators – to the top of its list of criteria and you don’t hear many people claiming the sport has lost its excitement.